[PD] suggestion: $0 in messages

Roman Haefeli reduzent at gmail.com
Thu Apr 5 13:44:46 CEST 2018


On Die, 2018-04-03 at 13:52 +0000, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> > Why is nobody complaining about not being able to use the third
> > creation argument directly withing a message? What's the fuzz about
> the
> > $0?
> 
> $0 isn't part of the argument vector. 

It's certainly not part of the incoming message either. 

> It's a unique id automatically
> generated for a patch/abstraction which the user happens to access
> through a dollarsign variable.

Regardless of the the actual value, its meaning is 'this very
instance'. So, I still rather see it as an argument of the patch than a
part of the message. But we could go on like this forever, I suppose.

> That locality hack doesn't require that the unique id be fetched by
> an unused dollarsign arg. For example, you could reserve the keyword
> "let" such that a message box with "let token2" would get converted
> behind the scenes to "1003-token2".
> 
> When users for a decade have said they wanted $0 in msg boxes,
> they mean that they want to use Pd's notion of send-symbol locality
> inside message boxes. They want that instead of manually querying 
> the value of a reserved dollarsign variable and sending that value
> to the relevant message box in order to get "let" behavior.

I'm not opposing the feature. I criticize the proposed implementation. 

> Also, since "$0" is already being used for this purpose it doesn't
> make much sense to try to also get "$0" to refer to the selector. 
> You'd end up with inconsistent meaning where it fetches the 
> selector in msg boxes but not in object boxes.

That's an absurd argument. I already pointed out that dollar variables
are a totally different thing in messages and objects.

>  Plus you can 
> already get the selector of an incoming message with [list]

Similarly you can get the value of $0 into a message.
 
> whereas you cannot get an abstraction's selector (which would 
> be handy for error reporting). 

What is the selector of an abstraction? 

Roman
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