[PD] "get" method for Pd

[Mathieu Bouchard]

Le 2011-11-17 à 10:42:00, Miller Puckette a écrit :

> This leads to an interesting larger design issue.  I've so far resisted
> the idea of using send/receive as a back channel for getting return
> values because of the unreadablity of the resulting patch.

It doesn't have to be written as such in the patch. A send/receive pair 
can be bundled together as one object. It would solve a more general 
problem of making things more readable in pd which would reach beyond just 
[samplerate~] or queries to canvases.

A few convenient shortcuts are sometimes all it takes to make a big 
difference in readability. Trying to stick to a minimal set of basic 
constructs forces the user to do more work than what would be necessary.

> The other way, assuming you want locality, would be to confect a unique 
> symbol name and then somehow to "receive" it (I'm not even sure that's 
> possible without making a self-editing patch).

Pd has a cool and very important feature named « abstractions », and using 
$0, you can create a unique receiver name without even having to think 
about it. No need for dynamic naming.

But if you want dynamic naming, there's [receives] with an s, which allows 
a single object to receive from many names at once and distinguish them 
while having always 2 outlets. You can use it with 1-element lists if you 
want. See this patch (screenshot) :

   http://gridflow.ca/help/receives-help.html

BTW, [receives] was actually meant to manage large number of GUI objects 
matching attributes, method names, and a get-method, without making 
patches unreadable.

> although it's migraine-inducing, the neatest solution would be to allow 
> "info" style objects to have a right-hand outlet that you connect to, 
> say, the "textfile" object like so:

You don't give any explanation of why you think it's migraine-inducing. I 
don't think that it's obvious why [get( and right-outlet could be more 
migraine-inducing than the average pd construct.

> I think Krzystof Chaya did something like this in his wonderful "xeq" 
> object (first Pd convention, Graz.)

I don't remember Czaja's talk in particular, but the idea must have been 
in the air back then. Flext 0.4 (nov 2002) introduced Jitter-style 
attributes in Pd, and I added my own kind of attributes in GridFlow in 
2005 by introducing parsing of the comma in objectboxes so that attributes 
setters always counted as ordinary messages.

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| Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC