padawan12 wrote:
Yeah, I'm with ya. For me those quotemarks say beware the usage of the word, because it does imply some illegitimacy against the commonly understood meaning. They say, if you were hoping to write a program in Pd using vi then you're in for a shitty time. Not to denigrate that word though, since as a "powerful means to express ideas" it's a language. I pretty much always call it a visual language
yes, i definitely would say too that Pd is a "visual language".
however, "visual language" implues "language" (at least in all human languages i know better, where the adjective ("visual") is just an add-on to the noun ("language"))
with care to prefix with the "visual", but of course it doesn't even have to be that interface. The thing that is really Puredata is the bit we dont see, the engine plugging together and executing the objects. In that way it's like a bytecode
hmm, i would rather say that the _language_ Pd is the thing we DO see, and not the interpreter that is executing it.
interpreter. I think we can safely say it's not like a written language the way most people think of one. For the love of kittens please don't tell me you DO write your Pd programs in vi and only noobs use the GUI :)
we once had a blind programmer, who was very interested in Pd. we therefore tried to get this topic ("using Pd as a blind person") on the agenda of pd~convention04, but it has been ignored by all relevant people (most of them probably don't even remember they were asked about it).
he now uses SuperCollider...
it doesn't have that syntactic structure
What's missing in it, in order to have a syntax?
No, it's got syntax, at many levels, functionally, because it must have to work. But not *that* syntax, "that" being its representation, as a fixed written language with linewise ordering in a file. In Pd GUI your syntax is spacially
so? looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax i cannot find any reference of "line" in the entire text. iirc, the syntax specs in kernighan-ritchie ARE a flow-diagram, so there seems to be a relation between syntax and visual languages ;-)
all over the place. That's nice, it changes your thinking because you can put down the essential operators as they come to mind and then plumb them up later, whereas with a written language is forming statements like sentances starting at the left side and finishing on the right. It's a different kettle of badgers completely. And it's got a syntax in the sense of strictness, the
indeed, it is no text-based language.
mfg.asdr. IOhannes