On Jan 23, 2008, at 4:50 PM, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, Hans-Christoph Steiner hat gesagt: // Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I think they were only added to Max/Pd as typing shortcuts, which is very weak argument in favor of them. I am not saying we should remove them, but I think they should be avoided as a matter of convention.
What other programming language has aliases?
It's not that uncommon if you think of operator overloading in C++ and many other languages, or things like "from math import radians as rad" in Python.
Operator overloading is a very different thing. It is allowing a given function name to accept different combos of arguments for the expressed purpose of implementing a given logical idea across a wide range of data types. For example, allowing "+" to work with floats, ints, longs, strings, etc.
Pd's aliases are just typing shortcuts.
Shortcuts can be a very strong argument, and especially in a graphical language, [t a a a a a a] often is better than [trigger anything anything anything anything anything anything]
I find that it is rarely better to use [t a a a a] and I rarely use any aliases. As you have written, good clean patches don't have cables crossing over, for example. I find that [trigger anything anything anything] encourages people to lay out their patches cleanly.
.hc
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