[PD] coloring arrays

[Jonathan Wilkes]

----- Original Message -----
> From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>
> To: João Pais <jmmmpais at googlemail.com>
> Cc: pd-list at iem.at
> Sent: Monday, October 24, 2011 12:56 PM
> Subject: Re: [PD] coloring arrays
> 
> Le 2011-10-24 à 17:19:00, João Pais a écrit :
>>  can you explain clearly what you meant in these 2 paragraphs?
> 
> Do you have clear questions ?
> 
>>>  Pd's data-structures don't have to be allocated as separate 
> items. They
>>>  can be allocated in array-fashion, as one big block.
> 
> I can see in Pd's source code that it has separate handling of data 
> structures for three cases : one for scalars, one for arrays, and one for 
> searching canvases for scalars and arrays.
> 
> scalars are individually allocated, while arrays are allocated in groups. The 
> latter is much more efficient in memory usage (though the difference matters 
> only for large arrays of small structs).
> 
>>>  What I say about Pd's data-structures doesn't apply to 
> array-like types
>>>  defined in other plugins, such as GridFlow, iemmatrix, iem16, Gem, PDP.
> 
> Those plugins don't use t_word at all in their definitions of arrays. They 
> might base their arrays on float, int, short, char, char[3], or whatever else, 
> but they don't use t_word. For pd's data structures, using t_word is not 
> sufficient, but it's necessary. Also, t_template and t_gpointer have to be 
> used. Only in those circumstances you can use the built-in DS classes such as 
> [get], [set], [struct], etc.
> 
> I've never used DS myself, but just looking at Miller's help files, I 
> can see that [element], [getsize], [setsize] have to do with DS Arrays.
> 
>>>  In theory, plugins can use data-structures and define new stuff about 
> data-structures, but in practice, no-one ever did.
> 
> Actually, in 2004 and/or 2007 I had grepped for t_template and similar things in 
> the Pd CVS (before it became SVN) because I was never hearing about DS 
> externals, and I needed to know. But no, there was nothing. Nowadays, there is 
> still nothing. It's possible to make other renderers of DS than just the 
> standard set of [plot], [fillpolygon], etc., but no-one has.

The only DS external stuff I've seen are the ds-gui abstractions by Luke Iannini and 
some other library (similar to list-abs) that I can't remember the name of.

-Jonathan

> 
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