[PD] [OT] Re: DIY GSoC: getting those projects done

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Mar 28, 2009, at 5:32 AM, Chris McCormick wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 10:42:25AM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>> No, this was about how [expr] can be a replacement for even a small
>> network of objects. If you make an abstraction that does
>> ($f1-$f2)*($f5-$f4)/($f3-$f2)+$f4, with just [+] [-] [*] [/] for  
>> example,
>> then if you change some things in the cold inlets, the changes  
>> might not
>> propagate to the bottom. This means you have to add a [pack 0 0 0 0  
>> 0] of
>> the whole thing and [unpack 0 0 0 0 0] to ensure every hot-inlet is
>> retriggered in the proper order. Actually, in this pack/unpack dance,
>> maybe you can skip the hot-inlet of the abstraction (?), but apart  
>> from
>> that, you're pretty stuck using pack/unpack if you want life to be
>> simple. Else you can weave a mess of [t b f] objects like a spider on
>> caffeine. That's what I mean.
>
> When I was thinking about writing a general purpose dataflow  
> programming
> language which addresses some of Pd's shortcomings, I did a lot of  
> thinking
> about the hot and cold inlet paradigm. What I came up with was the  
> following
> scheme:
>
> * Hot inlets are red
> * Cold inlets are blue
> * Neutral inlets are grey
>
> * A class has a default hot/cold/neutral inlet configuration defined  
> by the
>  author.
> * The UI allows the user to change the hot/cold/neutral status of  
> inlets.
> * An instance's 'run' method is executed when any of the following  
> conditions
>  are met:
> 	* Every cold inlet has been pinged (receives data)
> 	* Any hot inlet has been pinged (receives data)
> * Inlets cache their last received data if no new data arrives.
>
> In Pd, DSP inlets act like the 'cold' inlets above, message inlets  
> which aren't
> the leftmost message inlet [usually] act like 'neutral' inlets  
> above, and the
> leftmost inlet [usually] acts like 'hot' inlets above.
>
> I like the idea of this behaviour being defined by the class author,  
> but
> (re)configurable by the user.

Sounds like an interesting idea, its something more like how vvvv  
works.  For me, I make sense of vvvv by thinking of it as Pd with only  
tilde objects, no message objects.

.hc


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