[PD] abstraction setting its own arguments

Jonathan Wilkes jancsika at yahoo.com
Sun Aug 8 23:08:19 CEST 2010



--- On Sun, 8/8/10, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:

> From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>
> Subject: Re: [PD] abstraction setting its own arguments
> To: "Jonathan Wilkes" <jancsika at yahoo.com>
> Cc: pd-list at iem.at
> Date: Sunday, August 8, 2010, 8:30 PM
> On Fri, 6 Aug 2010, Jonathan Wilkes
> wrote:
> 
> > With [args] the blueberries appear in my cereal bowl
> without me having gone to the refridgerator to retrieve
> them.
> 
> I don't know why you wouldn't want the blueberries to
> appear in your cereal bowl automatically. It's a really cool
> features.

Sometimes it is.  Then sometimes I don't want blueberries, like if I 
want to use key/values pairs to set something that shouldn't change 
at runtime, and I want all messages sent to the left inlet to pass 
unchanged to the outlet (or blocked given some condition).

> 
> > And if I want to pour [milk~] instead of [milk] the
> refridgerator quits running.
> 
> Ok, you mean if the left inlet is an [inlet~] ? Well,
> that's a limitation of Pd. It doesn't allow abstraction
> inlets to be hybrid inlets. You can't even emulate, imitate
> nor wrap [tabwrite~], for example, because it has a hybrid
> inlet that you can't do with neither [inlet] nor [inlet~].

No but currently you can have a signal object with a leftmost [inlet~] 
and then have a right [inlet] for the messages.  So while your [args] 
adds the key/value feature, using this feature means you no longer 
have the ability to have a leftmost [inlet~] in an abstraction.

> 
> Why would you complain to me ? Complain to Miller instead.
> 
> > Well, I'd like to figure out the simplest way to write
> this particular definition so that someone unfamiliar with
> this e.e. cummings-like language has a chance of
> understanding it.
> 
> Write it the way you did, and if I ever find again
> something to say, I will tell you.
> 
> I don't know what "e.e.cummings-like" may mean because I
> don't have that background.

I'm referring to the act of personifying an indefinite pronoun.

> 
> >> But also, another big difference is that it does a
> job of
> >> [unpack]ing, that the messagebox doesn't do.
> Therefore, in
> >> that case, to follow an analogy with the
> messagebox, it's
> >> ambiguous whether there ought to be a
> complementary implicit
> >> [pack] behaviour in [args], causing it to have as
> many
> >> inlets as it has outlets.
> > 
> > If you did that then are all the inlets "hot"? 
> Or would a "bang" to the left inlet both update and output
> the args?
> 
> I don't quite know.
> 
>  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________
> _____________________ ...
> | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone:
> +1.514.383.3801


      



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