On Thu, 20 Aug 2009, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
I think jmax phoenix has scoping.
That's not what I was alluding to. It was about this part of the paper:
This decision was made to remove a layer of complexity that didn't seem to be strictly necessary in the context of computer music production, in order to make Max as accessible as possible to people who aren't professional computer programmers.
Well, I don't think it's the «real» (or «main») reason for it. Local scoping did not happen, because Pd doesn't need local variables. Local variables are not needed because named variables aren't particularly needed either. Named variables are not needed because cold inlets act as unnamed variables. After that much of a reduction of the need for local scoping, you have a situation in which the reasons against local scoping have a lot more relative weight...!
about jMax... I don't think we should bother talking again about jMax... but I'm not going to prevent people from summoning the dead.
Does DesireData?
On pd-list and/or pd-dev, I wrote some proposals about how the local-scoping could be. I don't recall getting feedback. Those ideas haven't been really integrated in the plans of DesireData. Depends on what's considered wrong with the current fake-local solutions. If it's mostly a matter of symbol pollution, then a plan to make symbols "biodegradable" would go a long way. I have a quite detailed plan about this, ... but it's just a plan. I mean it's a good plan, but it's not an implementation.
Fake-local scope like we have with $0-foo isn't necessarily wrong. It's not any more wrong than current namespacing solutions (which also use symbol concatenation from start to end). Ideally I'd rather have it not use actual concatenation, for various reasons, but I wouldn't bother with a change that isn't well-enough integrated with the existing pd and the existing uses of pd.
What's the status of DesireData these days, anyway?
Officially resumed, but semi-on-hold. I'm trying to "institutionalise" it a little bit so that I have more of an incentive to work on it steadily.
It looks like the roadmap hasn't been updated for quite a while.
What roadmap?... There wasn't an actual thing named "roadmap" until this spring, when I started trying to sort out items in the TODO list by priority... but it's very long to do so... especially when one thinks it's a good idea to take the time reserved on the roadmap, to actually try to fix bugs listed in the TODO, just so that they don't have to be listed in the roadmap. ;) (I did that).
Anyway... I will finally be able to say that there's an official roadmap soon, in the end.
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