[PD] nonlocal message passing scope

[Jonathan Wilkes]

Hello,
     I was thinking about scope for receive/send names yesterday and 

thought of a way to implement something more flexible than 

(explicitly) using $0 to define the scope of send/receive pairs (and 

possibly other objects that register a symbol).

My hack makes use of my "get" method for canvases patch:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3308027&group_id=55736&atid=478072

Right now I'm seeing several categories, and I'm not sure how they all relate-- 

meaning they may or may not require different approaches:
1) _this_ canvas, basically what you would get if you prefixed the 

.x12345 name before the s/r symbol

2) ways to break out of a canvas environment to the parent, parent of parent, etc., 

all the way to toplevel
3) ways to communicate among abstraction instances, including 

_this_ abstraction, all abstractions on the parent, parent of parent, etc., to toplevel

4) ways to communicate among all libdir abstractions*

5) global s/r names, abstraction global s/r names

#1 is pretty simple-- just add an attribute for the canvas symbol to the "get" method, 

and prefix it to the s/r symbol.
#2 is pretty simple, too-- just use integers to specify how far up the tree you want to 

go, get the $0 for that canvas environment, and prefix it to the s/r symbol.
#3 is similar to #2, except that you also prefix the directory and filename with the $0
#4 is like #3 except that you leave out the filename
#5 global is nothing prefixed, abstraction global is the directory and filename with no $0

I've made some abstractions [to] and [from] that can do the job for #1, 2, and global.
($1 for level, $2 for the s/r symbol-- though I'm not sure if that's the best order) 

The question is do I also try to add the functionality for #3, 4, and abstraction global 

in those same objects, or do I make a [toabs]/[fromabs] pair for that purpose?

In a way it'd be nice if there were a standard way to address all the possibilities above 

using only argument-- that way it'd be easy to add this functionality to already existing 

objects, like the array dialog and iemguis, with a single combobox (and simply default 

to whatever corresponds to global).  The problem is that in both #2 and #3 a single float 

arg would be nice to specify the level so I'm not sure how to differentiate between the 

two.

Also, are there any other contexts I haven't addressed in 1-5?


-Jonathan

* the only current example of this I can think of is inside the pddp libdir, where there's a 

global [v GLOBAL_PDDP_DSP] for the dsp status, but I'm not sure if it's used by anything 

other than ezoutput~.pd.