[PD] Question about object categorizing

[Jonathan Wilkes]

From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju <at> artengine.ca>
Subject: Re: Question about object categorizing
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.multimedia.puredata.general
Date: 2009-09-26 03:57:19 GMT (14 weeks, 5 days, 14 hours and 24 minutes ago)

[...]

"So basically the category system has more to do with social factors than 
with anything else... and those social factors don't help seeing things as 
they are. For example, something that unites most of AUDIO MATH object 
classes, is that the effect only involves one instant at a time, no 
memory, no feedback. This obviously excludes all four [fft~] and [framp~] 
from that category system, as those are block-oriented object classes 
(which could be the name of another category). But then, there are a few 
expatriates that you have to pick from all over to put them in the 
instant-oriented category. For example, [cos~] from the OSCILLATORS AND 
TABLES category; but also, the [tabread...] classes are instant-oriented, 
but they differ from all others so far, because they use data that doesn't 
come from the signal. Then we could argue about whether [noise~] belongs 
in or not (because it depends on how you look at it)."

Hi Matju,
     Do you have a suggestion for a more specific term or phrase than 
"block-oriented" in the sense you use above?  If it's taken out of the 
context of your explanation and used as a category, it implies that other 
objects are not "block-oriented," which is ambiguous.  Basically, I see 
four related divisions here:

1) "one-instant-at-a-time" objects as you describe above
2) block-oriented tilde objects in the sense you describe above
3) block-aligned tilde objects like [line~] 
4) sub-sample accurate objects like [vline~] and [vsnapshot~]

Since the vast majority of tilde objects are block aligned, maybe it's not 
necessary to have the "block-aligned" category and just use 
"sub-sample_accurate" for those few special objects like [vline~].  But 
then what's the clearest way to refer to nos. 1 and 2 above?

Thanks,
Jonathan