On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
On Jul 13, 2006, at 6:51 PM, Mike Wozniewski wrote: In general, I think its a good idea to have things that are settable also be query-able. I actually just posted to this list wanting this object, so I am happy.
In general, I think it's also a good idea to make things uniformly queriable, so that if there is a message "foo $1" for setting some property in an object, a message "get foo" to the same object will output the last $1 value that "foo" was set to, and output it on e.g. the rightmost outlet of the object.
For outletless objects, invisible objects (a canvas isn't generally visible as an actual objectbox) and other receive-symbol situations, there should be another mechanism for getting those properties uniformly. For example, an additional argument to the "get" message could be a receive-symbol for sending the result back.
The problem I see with that is that just a message "get" already means getting all attributes at once, but you can't add a receive symbol to it because it would conflict with the syntax for getting one attribute value in particular. So instead, "get *" could signify get all attributes, and get's $1 would default to * so that just "get" still works.
That's all because I don't want each important object-class to be surrounded by a dozen different helper object-classes that only do query the former, all with non-guessable names not following any convention, written by a dozen different developers who only wrote the one querier that they did need. There has to be a more predictable way for things to work.
See also: Jitter, Flext, GridFlow
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada