[PD] suggestion: $0 in messages

Alexandre Torres Porres porres at gmail.com
Fri Apr 6 01:59:48 CEST 2018


2018-04-05 16:17 GMT-03:00 Dan Wilcox <danomatika at gmail.com>:

> test? https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/346
>

wow, didn't see that coming :) THANKS!

Well, since I opened this thread and mentioned I wanted to do such a Pull
Request, let me respond so some issues raised here. One argument against
this - and one that had me going there - was the inconsistency that $0 in
messages is part of the same thing as arguments, and that $0 in messages
should be the selector. But this has been challenged and shown inconsistent
on its own, as then $0 should be the abstraction name, so I'm not convinced.

I actually always thought/perceived $0 as something else, a third
usage/case of dollarsigns. I guess many considered so, as many of us were
confused as to why not $0 don't work in messages. Hence, I'm actually
interested and after a canonical and formal definition of $0, for the sole
purpose I don't say stupid things to my students. I checked Pd's tutorial
(14.dollarsigns.pd), and it says that the different behaviour in objects
and messages "*may sound inconsistent, but it's not. Object and message
boxes are both actually messages, but in the case of the Object box the
message is passed at creation time, and for the Message box, at message
time*". As I read it, I don't find a conflict or inconsistency if "$0" also
gets evaluated and passed at "message time".

So after all the discussion, I still can't see the issue, as $0 becoming 0
doesn't seem of any use or a good behaviour. But I'm still open to more
clarification. Now, a reasoning in favor of adopting this is that Purr Data
is using it. Not that I think Pd should really adopt anything that a fork
decides to do, on the contrary, but it's hard not to see this does matter,
as many users are now comfortable, happy and abusing this feature in Purr
Data, and those patches can't run in Pd.

cheers
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