[PD] Abstraction [define]

Chris McCormick chris at mccormick.cx
Sun Dec 17 12:56:29 CET 2006


On Sun, Dec 17, 2006 at 11:35:58AM +0100, Steffen wrote:
> On 17/12/2006, at 5.13, Chris McCormick wrote:
> 
> >I use these a lot in my own patches at the moment in order to do in- 
> >patch
> >state saving of all sliders without any externals. It works very  
> >nicely
> >with no fuss.
> 
> That and the consensus expressed in other emails in this tread that  
> the definition of state is subjective might be good reasons for not  
> implementing state saving? Ie.: We want to save different things, and  
> we can, isn't that enough?

Well I agree with you for the most part. I think that the existing
solutions are enough for me personally, but they're not enough for
everyone. What about saving the 'state' of a big list of midi controller
changes? And all of the use-cases that Frank presents, too. These make
things more complicated.

We've already seen that amazing state saving things can be done with
existing internals, so my preference would be for a few small additions
to be made to the Pd core vocabulary that allow users to create their
own state saving mechanisms using Pd itself. I guess the question then
is what are those additions that give the greatest flexibility to people
who want to create state saving mechanisms? I think this was addressed
best by Frank earlier:

<http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2006-12/045251.html>

Whoops, recursive mailing list loop. :)

> Another thing related to this; i don't understand why it is so  
> important to bundle "things" into one file? The freedom that resides  
> in modularity i (at least) hold quite dear.

I think that it's about having the freedom of choice about which way
you'd like to work. Some people want to create custom patches which use
lots of their own library abstractions many times, and this feature
isn't useful for them. Other people want to distribute their patches to
others, and this feature becomes very useful. If the feature is there
you can choose.

Chris.

-------------------
chris at mccormick.cx
http://mccormick.cx




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