[PD] speedlimit of data in Pd

[Miller Puckette]

Hi João -

It's probably not a good idea to do the search recursively as I think
you must be doing.  It's possible to search through lists of any length 
using the "until" object to send "next" messages iterativly until the
pointer object says there are no more (connect the last outlet of the
pointer object back into the "stop" inlet of the until object).

cheers
Miller

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 08:38:26PM +0200, João Pais wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm comparing the x mouse position to the position of scalars
> displayed in the screen - so that I have a sample player that plays
> the samples where/when my mouse is sitting over.
> Since [pointer] only allows for a [next( method - no "previous" or
> an extra X command to jump several pointers -, the easiest
> implementation to search for a match is to start from the beginning
> of the list, and going [next( until a match happens. This works out
> fine usually, until the limit of 160 pointers. After that, I get
> always the stack overflow error in the object doing the loop - in
> this case, a [t b p], but I guess it doesn't matter much.
> 
> This is a kind of general problem: What is the "speedlimit of data"
> in Pd? How many operations can be done until a stack overflow
> occurs? That also happens when I try to automatically load the
> contents of a not-so-big [textfile] into an array with a click -
> unless I add a [del 1] to the loop. If the operation isn't in
> realtime, the problem can be circumvented, but anyway the issue is
> there.
> 
> How is it possible to increase the "control rate" in Pd? I tried
> changing the sample rate from 44.1 to 48, but there was no (small)
> change. I thought that it was a factor of the audio rate. Is there a
> non-empirical way of knowing the limits of Pd, or of the system it's
> operating in? Is the latter that important in this equation?
> 
> 
> To solve my problem at hand, I could try an approach that tries to
> eliminate some of the comparison operations in the patch. But in the
> end there is still the loop between [next( and [pointer], and I
> imagine that it wouldn't make a big difference.
> 
> 
> System: Thinkpad x61, w7, pd-ext-0.43
> 
> Best,
> 
> João