[PD] [pdconv16_r] Topic idea: Nested lists

[Roman Haefeli]

Hey all

After watching "Future Pd Developments" round-table (thanks to everyone
involved for the effort to record/put online), I feel like poking some
more into the structured list idea. Some of the conclusions that came
up:

 * Something like [list args] as a way to get all given arguments as a
   list would be utterly helpful.

 * Many data structures like nested lists or hashes can actually be
   implemented without changing the core of Pd.

I agree and I'm totally looking forward to a [list args]. Now, here
comes the thing. Let's say I want to make a wrapper abstraction around
[oscformat] and my wrapper abstraction takes an arbitrary number of
arguments.  What I'm looking for is a way to define which part of the
argument list is part of an OSC address and should be passed as
arguments to [oscformat] and which part should be used to set some
defaults in my wrapper abstraction. 

Example:

[myOSCmodule { dog cat food } { foo 123 }]

inside this:

[oscformat $1] <- would be instantiated as [oscformat dog cat food]

[loadbang]
|
[list append $2] <- would return 'list foo 123'


As far as I can see it, it is currently impossible to pass a variable
number of arguments to child objects and also [list args] wouldn't
address that. The simplest case of passing all arguments to a child
object could be covered with something like a '$@', but really cool
would be a way to define which arguments specifically should be passed
to child objects. That's why I came up with the idea of nesting lists.
Actually, I'm interested in a more sophisticated mechanism for argument
inheritance.

Comments?


Roman




On Mon, 2016-10-31 at 13:53 +0100, Roman Haefeli wrote:
> How can Pure Data's capabilities for dealing with different data sets
> be extended? Does it make sense to adopt concepts from scripted
> languages to the dataflow paradigm? Examples: tuples, dictionaries,
> multi-dimensional arrays, [...]
> 
> PROPOSAL:
> Syntax for nesting lists so that lists can be organized in a
> hierarchical manner and sublists (as opposed to only atoms) can be
> access with dollargs.
> 
> Reserved symbol atoms '{' and '}' could be used to enclose sublists
> (Since those characters are forbidden now, introduction wouldn't
> break
> anything).  
> 
> An example nested list containing two sublists:
> 
> 'list { a b c } { 1 2 3 }'
> 
> The third element of the the first list would be accessed like this:
> 
> [list $1(   <- returns 'list a b c'
> > 
> > 
> [list $3(   <- returns 'symbol c'
> 
> Dollargs would strip the encompassing curly braces and return only
> the
> content of the specified sublist:
> 
> [list $2(   <- returns 'list 1 2 3'
> 
> To extract the second sublist without losing its encapsulation, one
> would use:
> 
> [list { $2 }(  <- returns 'list { 1 2 3 }'
> 
> The same syntax can be used for dollargs used in arguments. This
> allows
> to pass a whole list or even a list of lists through a single
> dollarg:
> 
> [myabstraction { animal mammal cat }]
> 
> and inside this abstraction, we have:
> 
> [oscformat $1 miau]  <- instantiates [oscformat animal mammal cat
> miau]
> 
> 
> Whether to use curly braces or something different as list markup and
> whether to separate markup symbols with spaces or not is to be
> discussed. Also, the feasibility to implement the proposed idea would
> be an important discussion point, since the proposer only considered
> a
> user point-of-view. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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