[PD] [qlist] and locality

[Jonathan Wilkes]

On 04/03/2014 05:42 PM, Roman Haefeli wrote:
> On Don, 2014-04-03 at 17:33 -0400, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>> So yes, it's rather extreme of me to advise users to just use global
>> symbols and switch languages when they run into problems.  But I think
>> there's an assumption on this list that most users know enough about
>> other programming languages to judge for themselves the level of
>> expressiveness in Pd.  I don't think that's true, and I think it's
>> important to remind people just how clunky Pd is in these respects
>> compared to other modern languages.
> Clunky or not, Pd is the language I feel the most expressive with. YMMV.

Sorry, I'm not using the best terminology here.  I'm talking about the 
practical expressivity of the language.

For just one example-- let's say you wanted to make a polyphonic patch 
with 30 oscillators, and send them messages to set initial frequency and 
amplitude.  Let's use "Old-school Pd" which doesn't have abstractions.  
You make a subpatch, get it the way you want it, copy it, then paste it 
29 times.  Now when you need to make changes to the subpatch, you need 
to delete the other 29, copy the one you changed and paste it 29 times.  
That sucks.

Now let's look at "New-school Pd" which has abstractions.  In this case 
you get your abstraction the way you want it, instantiate it on a 
canvas, copy it, and paste it 29 times.  Now when you want to make a 
change to the abstraction, you click "Save" and Pd automatically pushes 
your changes to all instances of your abstraction.  You don't have to 
copy/paste everything again.  That's very simple, but it's one of the 
ways abstractions can make Pd more expressive.

So you can express yourself by programming in either version of the 
language.  But the "New-school" version makes it easier to do that. That 
may be clearer with the example of abstractions-- which you no doubt use 
all the time-- than with examples of scope that don't rely on $0.  But 
that's why I refer to other modern languages which don't suffer from 
that roadblock.

-Jonathan

>
> Roman
>
>
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