[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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