[PD] [pd] tables as patch storage

Jonathan Wilkes jancsika at yahoo.com
Tue Mar 27 17:04:37 CEST 2012


----- Original Message -----

> From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>
> To: Frank Barknecht <fbar at footils.org>
> Cc: pd-list at iem.at
> Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 9:45 AM
> Subject: Re: [PD] [pd] tables as patch storage
> 
> Le 2012-03-27 à 12:50:00, Frank Barknecht a écrit :
>>  On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 12:20:51PM +0200, Charles Goyard wrote:
>>>  Billy Stiltner wrote:
>>>>  why havent i seen more usage of tables as patch storage?
>>>  Maybe because you can only store numbers, not strings.
>>>  A textfile seems more versatile.
>>  Or a message box. Miller's help-files are crammed full with message 
> boxes used as patch storage. Patch-level storga it nice for toplevel patches, 
> but often not really useful in abstractions, when each abstraction instance 
> needs a different state, although they all share the same patch file.
> 
> [textfile] fakes being a filehandle or linked-list in the way it has a 
> sequential interface instead of a random-access interface, even though it's 
> really stored in RAM as a binbuf.
> 
> arrays ([table]) don't have that limitation, but have other limitations. 
> This creates unnecessary decisions in Pd, as people have to pick between 
> free-form anythings that have to be iterated through, or direct access to items 
> that have to be floats, and they can't have both advantages at once.

Anythings aren't really free-form, either.  "float my boat" isn't a valid message in 
Pd.  But even if you're reading a Pd file with [textfile]-- which as far as I know doesn't 
ever start with the word "float"-- you're limited in what you can do with it if you use 
the vanilla objects.  The obvious choice to filter messages, [route], will choke 
on data structure definitions like [struct foo float bar] and give you an error if you 
happen to [route foo].

> 
> (Of course, there are externals, but they're not the kind of thing used by 
> the kind of people who come up with list-abs.)

I don't know what that means.  What does that mean?

-Jonathan

> 
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