On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Thomas Grill wrote:
i don't know if you are aware of the way extra information is handled in Max/Jitter and also flext. There, the format is as follows
I am very much aware of that, and it is a bit of a discomfort, because the GridFlow object class name prefix is "@" too (since the beginning, that is, spring of 2001). Frankly I'm not too sure what other prefix it can be, but I want it to be as short as that. I really don't want [@ +] to become as verbose as [jit.op @op +]. And also GridFlow was there before Jitter, so why should I change my stuff. That's quite a bit of a dilemma.
#X object arg1 arg2 arg3... @key1 val1... @key2 val2.... @key3 val3 .... etc. The key-value pairs are known as "attributes", with the @ of course being a reserved symbol.
May I know why attributes have a prefix at all? Is it for distinguishing the end of the main argument list from the attribute list?
BTW GridFlow has something called startup messages, so that this:
[foo bar, hello 37, world 42]
is roughly equivalent to:
[loadbang] | [hello 37, world 42 ( | [foo bar]
except that those messages get sent at the moment the object is created, which is before it gets connected to other objects. This is my way of implementing attributes.
This is very easily implemented without modifications to the patcher format.
I call it modifying the patcher format because the regular Pd will destroy those attributes when they appear in almost any of the standard objects, as well as the patchcords.
PS: for some reason again, i wrote this days ago and forgot to actually send it.
________________________________________________________________ Mathieu Bouchard http://artengine.ca/matju