On Nov 10, 2007, at 11:36 AM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

...

If you search all of Austria for "Steiner", you'll get a much smaller list than 8 million. So if there are multiples, then return multiple canvases. Then I can work on a system to deal with that.

hmm, if i am in a room with you and 3 other people, i would rather not search the NY-phonebook to get your address, but instead talk to you directly.

however, my example with your name was a very bad one regarding the concept of class vs. instance. so let's leave it there.

i still don't fully understand why you want to do that. i mean: why do you want to do it via the class when you have the instances? what is wrong if you can get the canvas-pointer of a specific canvas? why do you need the canvas-pointer of something that does not have a canvas?

I want to have a way where it's easy for users to find the canvas names to send Tcl/Tk messages to them to control their visual properties. It seems to me that using the patchname is the most obvious since all Pd users know about that. If there are multiples, then the object could return a list of canvas names. Then it would probably be useful to be able to query the parent of a given canvas name.

[tot] can do a lot of this (not all?), but it's syntax is very much for the Tcl programmer. I am making an interface for Pd programmers.

apart from that: i really would like to have the canvas-name be generated (and hidden) by a function instead of directly using the canvas-pointers whenever you want to construct a message to sys_vgui ().

something like:

t_symbol*canvas_getname(t_canvas*x){ t_symbol*s=0; char buf[MAXPDSTRING]; snprintf(buf, MAXPDSTRING, ".x%lx", glist_getcanvas(x)); buf[MAXPDSTRING-1]=0; s=gensym(buf); return buf; }

which could eventually be changed to create more names that are more general (e.g. can be shared between several pd-engines)

I agree, so I did this in externals/bbogart/entry/entry.c. I am going to use this in tkwidget library too.

.hc

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