[PD] "object" or "class" in pdpedia

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Thu Sep 13 19:17:19 CEST 2007


On Thu, 13 Sep 2007, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> We're talking about what term to use in pdpedia for the descriptions of 
> the available building blocks for patches, mainly externals and 
> abstractions. When building patches, what users (scientists and artists) 
> deal with, are objects. The only thing you can do with a class when 
> building a patch is to make an instance of it: an object of the class.

No, you can also query the class for a helpfile. When doing that in pd, 
it's expressed as a synecdoche: you ask the object for the helpfile but in 
reality pd figures it out from the class. It is perfectly correct to say 
that helpfiles are class-specific: they cannot be set in a finer-grained 
way. Then in turn what a helpfile documents happens to be a class too: it 
documents all possible objects of that class at once.

The object is the unit of      patching, but
the class  is the unit of understanding.

> here--as in: "Just put an [osc~] object into your patch to make a sine
> wave." Nobody says: "Instantiate the [osc~] class to make a sine
> wave."--it is perfectly valid to use "object/symbol" on pdpedia. IMO
> at least.

If you decide to use the word "class", you don't have to be saying "class" 
everywhere where a class is involved. You don't have to pick between 
plugging the word "class" as often as possible or hide it all of the time. 
"Just put an [osc~] object" already implies the longer form. It's a 
pattern already encoded in the grammatical structure of English and other 
natural languages. In this case, [osc~] acts as an adjective and 
represents a class rather than a particular object. Contrast this to 
saying just "an [osc~]", in which it's a noun representing an object. In 
saying "all [osc~] are..." it's a noun representing all possible objects, 
and that actually is talking about the class because the class is all its 
own possible objects. There's nothing wrong with saying things in those 
ways and use the word "class" whenever it's actually warranted.

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


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