[PD] [text define] functionality for text in structs?

[Derek Kwan]

Miller Puckette <msp at ucsd.edu> writes:

> There ought to be a way to do this - some other object than [text define]
> should be able to do 'read' and 'write' operations.  Perhaps this needs
> to be added to the [pointer] object somehow.  (For a long time I've wished
> for a better suite of objects to traverse data structures but can't find
> a good design :)
>
> Miller

I suppose since we're on the topic, it appears that [array] faces a
similar situation to [text].

Actually I haven't had a whole lot of issues with traversing data
structures yet, but that's probably because I haven't dealt with
gigantic lists of scalars yet. I made an abstraction to get the nth
scalar that basically jumps to the head and uses [until] to bang [next(
until it reaches the desired index, but that method probably becomes
less-than-ideal as the number of scalars increases. I haven't dug around
the source for structs much yet, but would perhaps having structs act
more like doubly-linked-lists rather than singly-linked be
possible/worthwhile? I suppose maybe the ultimate ideal situation would be to
be accessible by index, at least from a front-facing user perspective.

>From my perusings of the pd-list archives, I know this definitely has been brought
up before, but probably one of the more clunkier things about dealing with data
structures is not being able to delete individual scalars.

Derek

-- 
Derek Kwan
www.derekxkwan.com