[PD] [PD-announce] the end of type restrictions

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> On Sun, 22 Jul 2007, Miller Puckette wrote:
> 
> >But to return to the original question, if my 'improvement' of
> >pack destroys the nice symmetry of pack and unpack arguments, this
> >certainly calls the design of unlack into question, since the only
> >reason its arguments are as they are is that they were designed so
> >in the context of a no-longer-extant pack.
> 
> Is symmetry so important?
> 
> Why is it that leftmost inlet is special, not only in terms of 
> implementation (the object _is_ its own left inlet except in case of 
> NOINLET) but also that it is the 'active' inlet for most classes?
> Because there's no special built-in outlet in those same objects...

Hm, but mostly there is, at least "kind of": The hot left-most inlet
corresponds to the right-to-left triggering of many objects.
 
 [unpack]
 |     /
 [pack] 

will fire only once because of this. In general this convention leads
to the "oriental" right-to-left reading direction one often uses when
deciphering Pd-patches.

> Why are some classes using the reverse order? [timer], [realtime], 
> [cputime]. For those objects, messages need to be sent left-to-right; the 
> rightmost inlet triggers output.

It's likely because of the nice symmetry in the following common idiom
to get inter-onset intervals:

 [t b b]
 |     |
 [timer]

[timer] (and its relatives to some extent) is an object that is used
in a hot-to-cold fashion more often than in the cold-to-hot direction
common with most other objects like [pack] etc.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                 _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__