Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
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.
no language with a native support for fixed aliases comes to my mind (apart from max/msp) - but i am sure there are people with more insight into different languages than me.
this doesn't mean that much though, as there are a lot of languages that allow to define custom aliases (which would be a nice feature in Pd too, btw), either by using C-style macros or mechanisms as frank's example.
Pd's aliases are just typing shortcuts.
and there is exactly nothing bad in that.
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.
the latter is true. otoh, i never use [trigger anything anything anything anything] and often use aliases. compared to other patches posted on this list, i find my patches clean and readable. this of course doesn't say that much, as i have written them, but then my patches are not totally isolated either.
i still find [trigger anything bang] less readable than [t a b].
so if we were to remove aliases, i would clearly vote to remove the long names...
mfg.asdr IOhannes