On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Tim Blechmann wrote:
the difference is, pd patches are not written in a text editor (at least, this is the usual case, i know, it's possible) and the parsing order is not transparent to the user ...
Right, that's it. There are interactive interpreters/compilers, for most languages (except mainly C, C++, ObjC, Java, C#, VB). However those usually don't result in things that get dumped to files (with the notable exceptions of Smalltalk and SELF).
unlike other interpreted languages, changes to the patch are done immediately,
Smalltalk and SELF make changes effective immediately on a per-method basis. However, those languages don't really have a top-to-bottom parsing order unless you really insist to load the code from text files (which is not usual for Smalltalk and SELF).
i.e. after changing something in the patch, there is no need to reload the patch file (compared with python's 'reload' or recompiling with a langugage like c/c++).
What pd needs here is the decoupling of creators from the classname-table, in such a way that it is possible to know what is the t_class associated to a given name, so that pd can know whether an object needs to be recreated or not, depending on whether the t_class associated with a name has changed or not.
what makes you think, that this is similar in text-based languages?
What you just said clarifies the distinction that you wanted to make.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada