On Mon, 11 Jul 2011, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
This leads to the question: should tooltip messages be per-instance or per-class? It could easily just be a field with a standard name in each object's struct, then it would be a simple per-class implementation. Having an 'assist' method means that the external writer can decide whether the string is per-class or per-instance.
Yes... whichever is appropriate. But the default assist-method should be designed so that in most cases, externals don't need to have a custom assist-method.
I don't see a need to extend any structs, Pd just needs to call an object's assist method whenever the mouse is hovering over one of its inlet/outlets,
A default assist-method needs to be storing data somewhere, and it cannot automatically pickup inlet names from anywhere in an external's source code. It has to be stored in some data-structures... For example, in both t_class and t_inlet (for nonproxy inlets).
This is an important point that Jonathan brings up: if we add an 'assist' method, that could mess up anything that ever sent a message that started with 'assist'.
Then just do it like it is for savefn and propertiesfn. You see, it doesn't have to be something that goes through class_addmethod. The 'assist' symbol issue is not an argument against defining an assist-method because it could be a field named assistfn directly in t_class.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC