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

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sat, 21 Mar 2009, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> Yeah, lets not turn a style guide into a style law.
> Sometimes crossings are not avoidable indeed.

Well, I don't just mean that. I also mean that sometimes crossings are 
clearer than any replacement for them. Often a simple X of wires is much 
more expressive than a [s]/[r] pair made only for the sake of following an 
unpractically stringent standard about crossings.

> I seem to go like that:
> 1) avoid crossings

Although, when I think my patch is messy, I first try to remove excess 
crossings, I can't possibly put avoiding crossings above everything else 
all of the time.

You have to make exceptions for what I was calling "cross-connect" and 
"side-cross-connect" in PdCon04; that is, respectively, crossing wires 
from two outlets of one object to two inlets of another, and from one 
outlet of each of two objects, to one inlet of the other. It would look 
very silly avoiding that crossing using a [s]/[r] pair. There are other 
variations of the same, using more wires. For example, see 
seq_fold-help.pd in GridFlow for a version with three wires.

> 3) if you really have to cross over objects, make the patch cords go
>   in straight vertical lines (straight vertical cords are the best cords
>   anyway)
> 4) even then avoid crossing over object inlets or outlets, as it is
>   ambiguous which cords are connected.

I'd put (4) over (3), really.

But those efforts are foiled by font issues and by the fact that Pd never 
stores the object width in the case of plain objectboxes. So if you change 
the font you can get a different positioning of outlets.

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