On Mon, 16 Jan 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
Programming with Pd is done with connecting objects and message boxes, so I think that we should stay true to this instead of making shortcuts which are more suited to a text language.
How much is Pd supposed to be a non-text language? It's already much more textish than a bunch of existing dataflow tools (GStreamer, OmSynth, BuzzTracker, ...)
Much if not most of this problem was caused by the shortcut of allowing sets starting with a float to be lists. So shortcuts can do real harm.
I don't think that shortcuts cause as much harm as the failure to teach them. It seems that most every course in Pd avoid to teach the real thing because somehow the students aren't programmers and it's supposed that they don't need to learn Pd that deeply and anyway Pd's own documentation doesn't necessarily go that deep.
Having # and $ could cause new confusions for beginners and others, like forgetting when to use # and when to use $. I think once people understand Pd's messaging, then it becomes much easier to read $ args.
In the debate between #,$ args and $-only args, what matters most is not how easy it is to read a single arg; instead it is how easy it is to read (and/or write) an arrangement of those args in a practical situation where you have to get something done.
Many aspects of programming are confusing to beginners, but they pay off in the long run. I found the messaging in object oriented programming quite confusing when I started, functions seem more straightforward.
I've read many bad tutorials on OOP, and in the light of this I think it's no wonder that people are confused about it. Lots of pop ontology, pop epistemology, and broken hierarchies of animal species and geometric shapes. The worst OOP tutorials are of course the ones that assert that JAVA is pure OOP and that (even worse) pure OOP _is_ JAVA.
PS: in standard math, sets are assumed to be unordered unless specified otherwise. Sometimes sets get extended with some comparison relation on their elements (making them "ordered sets") but then they get given special names:
1. posets aka partially-ordered sets 2. tosets aka totally-ordered sets 3. wosets aka well-ordered sets aka sequences
both Pd messages and Pd lists can be considered finite sequences.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada