On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Frank Barknecht wrote:
The subpatch/abstraction difficulty is more a "linguistic" problem. As abstractions could also be described as "subpatches", because they are subordinate patches inside another patch, it is easy to confuse them with the real subpatches according to Pd vocabulary.
Throwing some pseudorandom ideas in:
Now that I think about it, it is akin to the word "subprogram", which has been traditionally a name for what is now called "procedure" or "method". (don't use the word "subroutine" in front of me!)
Well, just by looking at the construction of that word, "subprogram" could be any kind of program element that can stand as a program on its own, where "on its own" is quite loosely defined. Therefore in modern programming a "subprogram" could be easily made to mean a class, for example.
I'm making a parallel with mathematics, where subsets are sets, and subgroups are groups, and subspaces are spaces, and wondering whether the word "subprogram" could follow that.
Now, back to "subpatches":
If it were following the compsci convention, "subpatch" would be the name for an abstraction, but right now, it's more like "blocks" in C (loose braces, just a nonautonomous subsection of a procedure).
If it were following the math convention, "subpatch" would possibly be a more general name inclusive of several concepts but maybe not what is currently called a "subpatch", depending on how "stands on its own" gets defined here.
Mathieu Bouchard http://artengine.ca/matju