[PD] httpget: fun with tcpclient and pdstring

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Wed Mar 4 16:32:05 CET 2009


On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Martin Peach wrote:

> That's nice. Now we need some html parsing objects so the pages go into 
> the patch and not the pd window. It works well if the received pages are 
> loaded into a table. I made tabfind to search a table for a string. 
> Tables seem more efficient than lists and less volatile.

Lists are volatile because they are (typically) stack-allocated or in any 
way their contract of use makes (argc,argv) only valid during the call... 
so you could use a heap-allocated argv but modify it between calls and it 
would still make the list data have a stack-wise accessibility.

Because lists are volatile, they need to be copied by any object that 
wants to keep them. It's actually worse than that, as objects used 
recursively have to watch out for what they can deallocate. It's not like 
you could make [list] be faster without complicating it... and this 
includes plain data-recursion as well too (set cold-inlet of an object 
while its cold-inlet has still a job pending on the stack).

Tables can be much faster but they also need to be statically-allocated 
(or dynamically-patched!), and they are type-restricted (where you can't 
say that any element slot may contain any atom one decides at runtime), 
and you have to find names for the tables because they can't be anonymous.

  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec


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