[PD] plugin~ external

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Tue Jun 15 04:10:25 CEST 2010


On Fri, 11 Jun 2010, Kim Cascone wrote:

> wouldn't this be more (in your words) 'imperative' behavior?

afaik, the word "imperative" is almost only ever used to mean that the 
programme revolves around modifying data using a series of steps for which 
the order is very important.

it's opposed to several other words such as "purely functional", in which 
the required ordering of the operations is as little as possible, and 
there is no stored data, as every piece of data is a parameter being 
passed around.

"declarative" is more vague and refers to anything in which it doesn't 
look like the programme is doing something, but instead is used as a kind 
of data processed by a "doer". It's a quite subjective notion. But usually 
it's used for much more sophisticated cases than ".pdsettings", which by 
usual standards would be just called a configuration file rather than a 
programme. For example, PROLOG is often called a declarative language, as 
you are programming by stating facts (and you can get damn far that way).

The Pd/MAX language family is quite special in being almost the only 
dataflow languages that are also quite highly imperative.

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| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801


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