----- Original Message -----
From: Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca To: Frank Barknecht fbar@footils.org Cc: pd-list@iem.at Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 9:45 AM Subject: Re: [PD] [pd] tables as patch storage
Le 2012-03-27 à 12:50:00, Frank Barknecht a écrit :
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 12:20:51PM +0200, Charles Goyard wrote:
Billy Stiltner wrote:
why havent i seen more usage of tables as patch storage?
Maybe because you can only store numbers, not strings. A textfile seems more versatile.
Or a message box. Miller's help-files are crammed full with message
boxes used as patch storage. Patch-level storga it nice for toplevel patches, but often not really useful in abstractions, when each abstraction instance needs a different state, although they all share the same patch file.
[textfile] fakes being a filehandle or linked-list in the way it has a sequential interface instead of a random-access interface, even though it's really stored in RAM as a binbuf.
arrays ([table]) don't have that limitation, but have other limitations. This creates unnecessary decisions in Pd, as people have to pick between free-form anythings that have to be iterated through, or direct access to items that have to be floats, and they can't have both advantages at once.
Anythings aren't really free-form, either. "float my boat" isn't a valid message in Pd. But even if you're reading a Pd file with [textfile]-- which as far as I know doesn't ever start with the word "float"-- you're limited in what you can do with it if you use the vanilla objects. The obvious choice to filter messages, [route], will choke on data structure definitions like [struct foo float bar] and give you an error if you happen to [route foo].
(Of course, there are externals, but they're not the kind of thing used by the kind of people who come up with list-abs.)
I don't know what that means. What does that mean?
-Jonathan
| Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC _______________________________________________ Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list