On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
however: intuitivly, i would consider an object which lots of mixed inlets to be badly designed anyhow: i think it is quite ok of pd that it enforces some thought on how to create the objects API (which inlet/outlet does what), instead of "just allowing anything".
It's not "thought".
Do not mistake "thought" and what has simply happened.
Just because there's a restriction in place doesn't mean that it's been designed for your own good.
The only reason why a regular inlet can't have two methods registered to it, is because that was how MAX was designed in 1987, and it was designed that way because:
* object-oriented theory doesn't know about inlets so the extra (non-left) inlets concept got inserted as some sort of automatic messagebox so that it appears that there's only one inlet at the level of defining methods.
* Pd (and almost all OOP languages) doesn't allow dispatch based on type of argument, so somehow the type of $1 got duplicated as a selector, which leads to all sorts of troubles as we've noticed...
That's it.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada