On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Krzysztof Czaja wrote:
I find it hard to give up the basic Pd principle that everything may be controlled with messages. I wonder, if there is any real technical reason for abandoning message-based handling of object state (including visual properties, IDs, whatever), apart from the shortcomings of the current Pd type system -- mainly, the lack of a string type?
Exactly. This is what I should have said when I asked the question "Why?".
Here's an idea:
* the Pd format is two fingers away from being a subset of the Tcl syntax: they are compatible in their handling of spaces and semicolons. The dollar signs are also somewhat similar.
* The "two fingers away" is that the handful of special characters of Tcl are mostly not special in Pd, or else are saved/reloaded in broken ways (e.g. backslashes).
* The special characters of Tcl could bring a lot more features to Pd, such as: {} for nested lists $ with more options \ escaping, saving non-ascii chars "" string [] (not sure how this would map to Pd)
* Using concepts from Tcl is a kind of reuse from a language that Pd already has some syntaxical affinity with. (Whether Tcl inspired Pd or SH inspired Pd or whatever else is besides the point; the point is that right now Pd looks somewhat like Tcl.)
* Most of those features would become useable all over Pd, including [netsend]/[netreceive] and all patchers. This is the killer feature of this proposal. AFAIK, the XML side of things doesn't do anything about it.
_____________________________________________________________________ Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montréal QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju