[PD] httpget: fun with tcpclient and pdstring

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Martin Peach wrote:
> Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>> 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.
>
> For the network objects the lists are made of floats so the type restriction 
> is not important.

Right, but when it comes to making reusable classes, you have to choose 
between type-restricted statically-allocated, and freely-typed 
stack-allocated, and whatever class you make for processing lists doesn't 
work on arrays, and whatever class you make for processing arrays doesn't 
work on lists. Is there any way around that problem?

> 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 symbol-table is a separate issue. You could make use of lists with 
mixed floats and symbols freely in lists and always reuse the same 
symbols, or you could be mixing floats and pointers.

> 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.

I never ever mentioned converting a web page into a bunch of symbols.

I'm concerned about the proliferation of list-operations and the 
duplication between list-operations and array-operations and how it will 
tend to inflate the number of classes and by default (if the design of 
classes just goes the usual way) the interfaces of those two sets of 
classes won't be synchronised with each other, so it will mean more 
documentation to make and especially more documentation to read.

> Tables also use half as much memory as lists

yeah, but you saw the price of RAM ? ;)

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec