[PD] [PD-announce] pdlua and tclpd: now embedded in Pd-extended 0.43

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at at.or.at
Mon Feb 27 02:15:11 CET 2012


There are two new, easy ways to write objects for Pd: tclpd by Federico Ferri and pdlua by Claude Heiland-Allen, Frank Barknecht and Martin Peach.  Both are now included in Pd-extended 0.43 and are automatically loaded at startup.  That means you can write a script in Lua or Tcl and have that script be a true object in Pd.  Both pdlua and tclpd provide the large majority of the Pd externals API, and you can even write GUI objects using tclpd.

Tcl and Lua both excel at handling strings, one thing that Pd is not the best at, so if you have a project that needs to parse or manage a lot of strings, then you have a new approach.

There are some other ways of using other languages to write objects for Pd: pyext for Python and pdj for Java.  These two are different in a key way than pdlua and tclpd.  pyext and pdj allow you to load scripts into an object called [pyext] or [pdj].   tclpd and pdlua let you create full Pd objects that are completely transparent to the user.  You create an object written in tclpd or pdlua just like any other Pd object, and those objects can have their own help patch too.

Both pdlua and tclpd come with a lot of examples, go to the Help Browser and find them in the list of libraries there.  I also started writing the 'tclfile' library to bring the Tcl file API to Pd:

http://puredata.info/downloads/tclfile

.hc
_______________________________________________
Pd-announce mailing list
Pd-announce at iem.at
http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-announce



More information about the Pd-list mailing list