[PD] check mail with pd ?

[Jonathan Wilkes]

On 02/08/2014 11:44 PM, Simon Wise wrote:
> On 09/02/14 07:59, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>> On 02/08/2014 01:40 PM, Martin Peach wrote:
>>> A few years ago I implemented a patch for strings in Pd that adds a 
>>> string or
>>> blob type that allows (I think) for what you are describing. I 
>>> believe it's
>>> still part of Pd extended, but Miller didn't like it for some reason.
>
> ...
>
>>> I prefer to manipulate strings in a another language as it just 
>>> seems like a
>>> lot of work to make it happen with boxes and wires when you can just 
>>> call
>>> string functions in a high level language.
>
> ...
>
>>> Kind of like building a Turing machine holes-in-paper-tape version of a
>>> program, it can be an interesting exercise but practically it's 
>>> useless.
>>
>> Read in transcript of congressional testimony on NSA surveillance.
>> Split into one string for each line.
>> Read one line every second.
>> If a line contains the word "terrorism" make a sound.
>> User takes a drink.
>>
>> Totally useful. :)
>>
>> What is it about boxes connected with lines that you think makes this 
>> difficult?
>
> Perhaps it is the long term and very well established resistance to 
> adding a few types to the message syntax ... integers capable of 
> indexing reasonable file lengths, strings which don't flood the symbol 
> table, floats that aren't in danger of being truncated, bytes or chars 
> which won't trigger parsing issues. Matrices are available  via an 
> external library (gridflow, within its own externals including 
> non-native print and so forth) and GPU video access is possible via 
> GEM with its private message syntax, but core Pd is very focussed on 
> what it originally set out to do. There have been some moves on this, 
> just very slow and careful ones.
>
> A graphical dataflow language is very nice for dealing with DSP and 
> with control and interaction logic, and for doing so in a bunch of 
> machines distributed over a network. Pd has lots of good ways to 
> receive and send control messages and link with hardware and other 
> programs. But dataflow and procedural algorithms are quite different 
> and parsing strings is a very common thing to do when programming ... 
> if you are familiar with the procedural way and have a good set of 
> tools available to abstract the details then its easier to just go 
> with what you know.
>
> It would be nice to be able to do this natively, especially since many 
> Pd programmers are not that familiar with procedural programming. It 
> is certainly practical and worthwhile to extend Pd for this but that 
> requires some of the things that have been long put off till later for 
> a very very long time. Meanwhile the Lua external provides the way to 
> do what remains problematic natively (as much due to policy as 
> anything else) and anyone capable of adding functionality to Pd will 
> find it much much easier to use Lau than to engage in a huge and 
> perhaps fruitless effort to push it into Pd.

It sounds like you are rationalizing and encouraging non-development.

But it also sounds like we agree that there is nothing about boxes of 
text connected with lines that makes string manipulation more difficult 
than lines of text.

-Jonathan

>
> Simon
>
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