[PD] style guide idea: [send foo] versus [; foo(

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> I am not proposing to limit the use of dollar args in message boxes for 
> dynamic sends, that is a very useful feature. The example you give here, 
> though, is an example of a shortcut for typing, there is no other 
> benefit that I can see.

Shortcuts for typing are also usually shortcuts for reading for people who 
are willing to accept them.

> And at the risk of sounding pedantic, I am going to quote one of my favorite 
> ideas relating to code: "Programs should be written for people to read, and 
> only incidentally for machines to execute".

I'd generally agree with your position, but I think that the «only 
incidentally» part is quite dismissive of the reason why programmes are 
written in the first place. Programming languages didn't develop 
significantly until there were machines to run them. At the very least it 
waited until that there were expectations of future machines that would be 
able to handle them, or expectations of future projects that would benefit 
from newer languages. The code doesn't really exist in a bubble.

But most of all, readability doesn't necessarily mean longer code, and I'd 
even dare say it more often means shorter code.

> In Pd, [trigger] is the central mechanism for specifying execution 
> order. Therefore, in the interest of readability, [trigger] should be 
> used as much as possible.

Excuse me: by opposition to what???

> Clearer documentation of the messages boxes would also be a great thing. 
> But you almost anything without ever using a semi-colon in a message 
> box, they are mostly used as a typing shortcut,

In the internals of Pd, the semicolon in messages is definitely the 
original feature, and [s foo] was afterwards added as a "longcut". What 
makes [s] the appropriate default way of doing something, such that the 
semicolon becomes a "mere shortcut"?

> and many people are confused by them, so I think we should really be 
> limiting them to things like dynamic sends, since that is hard to do in 
> other ways.

People are confused by Pd... should we be limiting everybody to some other 
software... because there are people who might not understand Pd. If 
that's not the same thing as removing features that "might be confusing", 
I don't see how.

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     a user, so remove it." »
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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec