[PD] [Style Guide] 1. Separators in Send/Receive/Value names

Luke Iannini lukexipd at gmail.com
Wed Aug 13 09:27:33 CEST 2008


Okee, here's the first small wooden building for the storage of
two-wheeled mechanical contraptions which we must design, architect
and finally apply an agreed-upon shade of thin colored acrylic.

Ratification 1:
Separators in Send/Receive/Value names

Synopsis:  When writing send and receive names, two situations arise
in which one might like to separate components of a name.
1.  To separate two words, as one would normally do with a space.
2.  To separate items in a hierarchy, as one does in a filesystem.

The characters under consideration are: _, -, ., / (and, camelCasing)

Examples:  Separators after a dollarsym, like $0-send.  Separators
when writing a multi-word name, like my-long-send-name.  Separators
when writing a hierarchical name to be used within Pd, like
drumkit.snare.noise.amount.

Possible confusion: Writing a hierarchical name to be used with OSC,
like /drumkit/snare/noise-component, and when writing a namespaced pd
object name, like [mapping/upsample]

Questions:  Should we separate dollarsyms with the hierarchical
separator, or the space separator? (i.e., if space is "-" and
hierarchy is ".", should it be $0.my-send or $0-my-send?)

Should we reserve the /, the most obvious choice for a hierarchical
separator, for use in OSC names and namespaces, using "." as a
'Pd-hierarchy-separator', or adopt the / for Pd name  hierarchies as
well?

-------------------------

Now, my thoughts on this:
I think we should adopt "-" for spaces, since it's the most prevalent
style I've encountered.  And, I think whatever we decide on as the
hierarchical separator should be used to separate $0, $1 etc from the
name itself.  When creating a hierarchy in a send/receive, one usually
gloms together keys from parent abstractions, e.g. start with
/bigsynth, then inside pass $1/filter to a child abstraction, then
inside that use $1/cutoff to get /bigsynth/filter/cutoff.  I see $0 as
no different; it means (or, is used to mean) "this-instance"/cutoff,
and thus should be separated accordingly.

And, I have a slight leaning towards "." over "/" as the send/receive
hierarchical separator since it provides a distinction from OSC
addresses and namespaces.

Best
Luke




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