[PD] Interruption of audio / Loading sound into array

[Mathieu Bouchard]

Le 2011-11-10 à 09:54:00, Charles Goyard a écrit :

> Hans and I are talking from the user (user=the guy that creates a patch)
> point of view. That is, it _looks like_ objects do things in parallel
> when patched with parallel cords.

That's not from a user's perspective, that's the perspective of someone 
who doesn't have a clue. A real user learns about execution order, [t] 
order and [unpack] order in the first few hours of learning. Those who 
don't actually get their job done by someone who knows. (this doesn't take 
~-objects into account, who use a different execution model)

> Of course that's not true, pure-data is more of a multiplexed 
> state-machine, just like an ethernet network. [...] Does "switched 
> state-machine" sounds good to define pd's core ?

Well... sounds like a math undergrad exercise of fitting any state 
transition model onto a possibly infinite-by-infinite matrix and then try 
to multiply it by an infinite vector of markov chain state probabilities, 
using limits and stuff. I vaguely remember doing this in 2nd year at UdeM. 
It's one of those « anything can be expressed as anything else » kind of 
exercise.

When trying to be practical, though, flat state machines are usually 
ineffectual, and nearly everybody who says just « state machine » means 
the flat thing. Some came up with something named hierarchical state 
machine, which is a much more useful model for nesting stuff, because it 
uses a stack. But to understand PureData, the whole GOTO concept at heart 
of state machines is not very useful. You still need to distinguish how 
many messages a [t] or a [until] has sent, but the GOTO model isn't so 
useful for that, especially when number of states are variable or 
unlimited, but also any time that a metaphor of storage can be used (e.g. 
[until] uses an internal int variable to count iterations when it needs 
to). But overall, it's better to put a lot more emphasis on stack 
metaphors when teaching Pd, because a lot of Pd is to send messages 
(function call) and to come back (return) from the processing of a 
message.

> In that respect, soundfiler is not made to run well in a switched
> environnement such as pd. Just like a network interface that would
> saturate a link, ignoring time-slots, collision-detection and such.

The big resemblance between the two is really just the realtime aspect. 
Apart from that, Pd doesn't generally ever discards any data, whereas a 
network switch has to, and Pd does its execution mainly by depth-first 
searches, whereas network switches hardly ever have to do any recursion.

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