[PD] pdlua output

Claude Heiland-Allen claudiusmaximus at goto10.org
Thu Jan 31 15:36:30 CET 2008


Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Hallo,
> Claude Heiland-Allen hat gesagt: // Claude Heiland-Allen wrote:
> 
>> Frank Barknecht wrote:
>>> One thing I wanted to ask here: Is there a special reason that pdlua
>>> isn't using the (new in 5.1) vararg syntax with "..." for methods and
>>> maybe also in outlet(...) or similar places?
>> Yes.  It makes it very difficult to do useful things with variable 
>> length inputs (such as iterating over them, storing them, etc).
>>
>> See for example:
>>
>> http://lua-users.org/wiki/VarargTheSecondClassCitizen
> 
> Thanks for this pointer. As I only write Lua for some weeks now, I may
> miss some things, but it seems to me, many of these issues aren't
> really a problem in pdlua's inlet and outlet messages, as these AFAIK
> will practically never contain "nil"-values. And if they don't contain
> nils, then the varargs can be converted to a table with {...} (or
> unpack'd from a table) on demand without running into problems with
> holes in tables coming from nils. And often, especially for
> inlet-methods, a full table may not even be needed to construct. 

Yes, I see your point - but I feel the syntactic sugar is outweighed by 
the other reason why I used tables instead of varargs:

Lua's default stack size is small (45 slots or so, iirc), and Pd 
messages can be (almost) arbitrarily large.  A table uses 1 stack slot, 
varargs uses 1 slot per element.


Claude
-- 
http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org




More information about the Pd-list mailing list