[PD] Idiomatic Pd

Matt Barber brbrofsvl at gmail.com
Tue Jul 29 09:19:04 CEST 2008


Luke,

I like some of your ideas, but I'd offer the following:

>>> Style:
>>> * If giving $0 as an argument to an abstraction, it is always first in
>>> the argument list [1]
>>
>> I often put it last (and it's specified to be that way e.g. in
>> Memento)
> My reasoning here is that $0 is probably the most common thing to pass
> to an abstraction, but abstractions have varying numbers of arguments,
> so $0 will sometimes be $3, sometimes $2, sometimes $7, and that
> swings my brain around.  Putting it in the first slot means that $1
> gains a sort of second meaning as "my parent's $0", which I think is
> handy.

Why should we assume anything about an abstraction's parent?  It seems
to me a lot has to be assumed about the general purpose of
abstractions for one to say that a child's $1 should usually be the
parent's $0... I tend not to hierarchize my abstractions to quite this
extent, and prefer to allow abstractions to be relatively agnostic
about their surroundings when possible.  There's one style of patching
which suggests that abstractions should operate as closely as possible
to built-in objects, which (in vanilla at least) are usually also
basically unaware of their surroundings (save for [block~] and other
canvas-local settings, or send-receive type bindings, which granted
depend a lot upon $0 but not usually explicitly as a single argument
passed to objects)...  Though, I suppose I agree that when $0 *does*
need to be passed, it could go first.  I can think of many situations
where it would want to go last, though -- for instance an abstraction
which takes mandatory arguments and optional arguments, of which one
of the latter is a number to prepend to a symbol to designate, say,
the send symbol of a group of instances within a parent abstraction
which might be used e.g. for error cleanup, and which otherwise should
be set to that instance's (not the parent's) $0 when not in the
presence of a parent that knows what to do with the error message (so
it isn't sent anywhere at all).

A related topic is: in general, if there's an adequate solution with
an abstraction, should one use it rather than an external?  Does this
change in pedagogical situations where a student might profit in
learning from a rather sparse set of unit generators?  Does this
change when performance is required above all? etc. etc.

Another related topic -- for GOP abstractions, is it bad form to cover
the abstraction name and arguments with a canvas?  What if these
things are printed as labels on canvases?




>>> * When prepending $0 to a symbol, only add a "-" to separate it from
>>> another number, like [r $0-1stSend].  Otherwise the symbol should
>>> immediately follow, like [r $0mySend].
>>
>> I always seperate $0 with a $0-dash. $0myGod is easy to misunderstand.
>>
> That's all cool, and I think you are in the majority on that.  I think
> I just took camelCase because it reminded me of Smalltalk and Cocoa,
> which remind me of Pd : ).

Smalltalk and Cocoa remind me more of supercollider (y/n?), which
isn't a bad thing at all.  Still, I prefer the hyphen after $0 in
general, as it can apply to all cases.  As an aside, I also prefer $0
at the beginning of a symbol whenever possible to ensure backwards
compatibility with <0.40 -- and a [makefilename %d] trick with $0 to
allow things like pd-$0-edge_of_now (I suppose I prefer underscores to
camelCase... meh - I'm not sure this is vital to "proper" patching,
but it does remind me of the C-style the objects themselves are
written in).


>>> * When working with stereo, Left and Right pairs are written with Le
>>> and Ri appended (to distinguish them from an R denoting "receive",
>>> above)


I think it's better to remain completely neutral with regard to the
numbering of channels.  Stereo should not stand out as a preferred
case... many other more general nomenclatures could apply, e.g. ch1
ch2 ch3 ch4 (or ch0 ch1, etc. for channel array lovers), or just the
numbers, or something else.  This might allow code from a stereo
garden to be plucked and implemented in a multichannel space in the
future, with little worry.  Also, actual pairing of loudspeaker to
channel number should not, in general, be codified.  There are too
many "standard" and acceptable configurations by now to anoint some
over others.

I guess I second Frank's suggestion and say let's see what patching
styles abound and let people be creative -- but when there's
codification, let it be generalizable to as many situations as
possible.

Thanks for the great suggestion about a style guide, though -- it
would be especially helpful to newcomers and students.  Things like
"decouple number boxes and bangs used for debugging from the workings
of the patch" I feel are almost essential examples of efficient and
"proper" pd patching.  And early, strong, and repetitive grounding in
[trigger].

Matt




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