[PD] table abstractions

[Matt Barber]

Hello list,

For a while there had been talk about starting a vanilla-only
table-abstraction collection in the spirit of list-abs and the iem_tab
objects.  This could be useful both for manipulation of or
calculations using table data and for populating tables with desired
data (in the manner of the csound GEN routines).

I'd love to start it, but I don't know if I have enough Pd cred yet to
be in charge of it.  There are a few problems I'd like input on:

1) Naming -- would it be worth it to have different prefixes for
objects which manipulated data, e.g. [table-reverse], and objects
which populated tables, e.g. [tabwrite-blackman]?

2) Input-Output -- for the ones which manipulate data, should that
generally happen in place unless a destination table is provided --
[table-qsort foo] sorts table values in table named foo and writes
results back to foo, while [table-qsort foo bar] would sort foo's
values and write them into bar?

3) In general I'm assuming that the objects which populate tables
should simply write to a table, not internally provide the table to be
written to.  For instance, I'm thinking a [tabwrite-hann foo] which
writes a hann window into foo would be more useful than a [table-hann
foo] which internally instantiated a table called foo AND wrote a hann
window to it, and responded to messages like "resize" with a larger or
smaller hann window (I think accessing the table from without might be
too buggy for this to be worth it).

4) Interpolation -- I'm also assuming that anything which would write
a table that would usually be read by [tabread4~] or [tabosc4~] should
write the guard points for proper interpolation by default.


I've attached an example [tabwrite-chebyshev], which writes a weighted
sum of chebyshev polynomials of the first kind to a table, probably
for use with waveshaping, as an example of what I'm thinking of, and
of a few options members of such a collection might have.
(Incidentally, it might be a good idea to abbreviate this particular
one to "cheb" or "cheby" due to the many transliterations, or even
something like "chebsum" to name it like the sinesum or cosinesum
array methods.)


My thought is that many of us have already been making and using
abstractions like these, and I think it would be worth it to collect
them in a vanilla library for general use.

Matt
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