[PD] list-abs and externals [was: Re: [pd] tables as patch storage]

[Frank Barknecht]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 11:21:15AM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> list-abs was designed to only use pd's builtins, no externs, which
> makes it more like academic exercises of proving that anything can
> be done with a Turing tape machine, rather than being designed in a
> pragmatic way. 

Actually I consider list-abs to be very pragmatic *because* it only uses
builtins. This makes it highly portable and trivial to use
everywhere, even without installing it globally.

If you treat list-abs as an interface or API, it also is very easy to 
optimize the objects by using externals inside of the
list-abs-abstractions without having to change the surrounding patches.

I already sketched this approach four years ago:
http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2008-12/066571.html

Ciao
-- 
Frank