[PD] httpget: fun with tcpclient and pdstring

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Mar 4, 2009, at 11:46 AM, Martin Peach wrote:

> Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Tables also use half as much memory as lists because they are mainly  
> an array of floats, while a list of floats is actually an array of  
> atoms, each atom comprising a tag indicating that it contains a  
> float as well as the float itself.
> For the network objects the lists are made of floats so the type  
> restriction is not important.
> Also a table can be reused and resized and its contents never get  
> added to the symbol list so there's no constantly increasing memory  
> involved. The typical web page has a huge amount of irrelevant text  
> that would quickly clog the symbol table, so it's more efficient to  
> extract the relevant bits before converting any of it to a symbol.


It seems that we should have a string.h for tables then.  That would  
be a good starting point, just make a library that is just Pd  
interpretations of all the string.h strcpy, etc. functions, but have  
them operate on arrays and maybe lists of floats too.

There could also be a totally Pd-ish string library too.

.hc




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