hi all, hi Miller,
just managed to scan over all the recent talk about state saving, presets, etc. on the pd list...
...no doubt I am thinking slow. In fact, I have not even figured out yet, why any generic, user-friendly mechanism for storing and recalling run-time state is bad in principle.
Is it so, because it is hard to guarantee that the state being recalled was actually stored for the recalling patch, and, that the patch has not been confusingly modified since?
However, there are several ways to validate a state against a patch, both at a time of state-file loading, and at a time of a recall. None is perfect, theoretically, but this cannot be that important, really. At least, any generic validation method would do better than specific, hand-crafted schemes, patched around textfile, etc.
Apart from load/recall validation, I do not see anything heretical, technically. There is nothing special, for example, about storing object's state using a mechanism similar to the class' save function.
Perhaps the reason is not technical at all... but what is it?
Please, help.
Krzysztof