[PD] Named arguments for abstractions

[Jonathan Wilkes]

Hi Chris,
I prefer the idea of using the comma atom to send messages to an object/abstraction at init time.

Example:
[bar 15 25(
|
[foo]

would be equivalent to

[initbang]
|
[foo, bar 15 25]
Benefits:
* messages can be type-checked or arbitrary length, just like any pd message
* eases development of externals.  For instance, sigmund~ would have had 96 fewer lines of code because this syntax would have done away with the need for flags
* it looks like message-box syntax and behaves nearly the same
* once implemented, it would automatically apply (consistently) to every internal/external object
* matju already implemented it in Gridflow

Drawbacks:
* [expr], [list], [select], [route], and a few others would need to be treated specially to retain their current behavior regarding commas
* abstractions require some mechanism to retrieve those init-time messages.  I believe matju had them shoot out the leftmost inlet of the abstraction, with the assumption that the user would have a [route] sitting there to parse them.  Another idea would be to retrieve them from an introspection object like [canvasinfo] (and maybe have another object which splits that into a sequence of messages).

-Jonathan

On Thursday, October 23, 2014 11:28 PM, Chris McCormick <chris at mccormick.cx> wrote:
 


Hi all,

Here's a design pattern for passing named arguments ("bar=true foo=12")
into an abstraction.

Cheers,

Chris.

-- 
http://mccormick.cx/

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