[PD] documentation (was: DSP abstractions)

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, Frank Barknecht wrote:

>> You mean like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorator_pattern ? 
>> (original page at http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?DecoratorPattern )
> Yes, I meant it as a reference to that design pattern, but more to the 
> problem it tries to solve

Well, IMHO, a pattern is as much the problem being solved as it is the 
solution to the problem. It takes the problem to think of the solution 
related to it. (If it wasn't solving a problem, it wouldn't be a solution)

> i.e. adding functionality to existing objects and not as much to the 
> proposed solution i.e. adding that behaviour at runtime. I guess I'm 
> proposing simple "subclassing" or wrapper-abstractions as solution.

I think that at the level of making pd abstractions, "subclassing" and 
"wrapping" can not be thoroughly distinguished.

If there is any feature that I'd want from inheritance that can't be done 
by simple wrapping, it would be linearisation of inheritance, including 
elimination of redundant base classes in the hierarchy. E.g. if you have 
an abstraction called [D] which wraps [B] and [C], and then both [B] and 
[C] each wrap [A], but you want only one instance of [A] to exist in 
total, then what do you do? This is the problem that linearisation of 
inheritance solves.

> But actually I'm trying to not to propose anything at all at this stage.

why?

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada