[PD] [pd] tables as patch storage

[Jonathan Wilkes]

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

> From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>
> To: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>
> Cc: Frank Barknecht <fbar at footils.org>; "pd-list at iem.at" <pd-list at iem.at>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 11:21 AM
> Subject: Re: [PD] [pd] tables as patch storage
> 
> Le 2012-03-27 à 08:04:00, Jonathan Wilkes a écrit :
> 
>>  Anythings aren't really free-form, either.  "float my boat" 
> isn't a valid message in Pd.
> 
> I mean as free-form as storable Anythings can be. I not talking about atoms that 
> are not storable, nor about non-atoms, pink elephants and winged pigs.
> 
>>  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"--
> 
> selector float can always be implied, so it needs not be written. This is 
> because of what binbuf_eval does.

Right but you can't help it being written in a Pd file, and thus the tools Pd 
vanilla gives you to read/write/parse a textfile-- the [textfile] object and 
[route]-- cannot even be used to parse the software's own file format.  You 
have to either use list-abs [sroute] or build your own workaround to avoid 
the "bad argument" error with impunity.

> 
>>>  (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?
> 
> 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. There's not 
> enough basic functionality in the language, to be able to make abstractions that 
> are both simple enough and fast enough.

Well, yes, that's obviously true just by the fact that there isn't a (sensible) way to get 
an abstraction's arguments using the core objects.

Question is: what needs to be added to make abstraction use simpler and faster?  I 
found that the "get" method I added to canvas opened a lot of doors, even providing a 
quick way to get better locality in Pd (and the coding only took about 30 mins for 
that).  I'm sure there's a lot more that I'm missing, though.

-Jonathan

> 
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