--- On Sat, 7/31/10, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
From: Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca Subject: Re: [PD] abstraction setting its own arguments To: "Jonathan Wilkes" jancsika@yahoo.com Cc: pd-list@iem.at Date: Saturday, July 31, 2010, 9:12 PM On Sat, 31 Jul 2010, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
That's just an example. But I think it is the
best way to handle getting args inside an abstraction because it obviates the need for all of the "arg-getting" objects scattered about pd-extended,
It still wouldn't support non-default defaults of [args], nor support the ()-parsing that [args] does, nor handle the comma-message feature of [args]. I think that you are making overly broad assumptions about people's needs.
I'll definitely have to play around with [args]. Some things I see up front are:
crash in winxp if you happen to remove the abstraction's inlet.
[loadbang]-[args] is so trivial.
Ok, I certainly don't have the know-how to refactor $@ for inclusion in Pd-extended, but here's my thought: it's more flexible to have one standard "arg-getter" like $@ and one or more "arg parsers" than it is to have one or more "arg swiss army knives".
Is there anything [args] can currently do that wouldn't be possible by taking an "anything" at its inlet? Because currently, with [args]-- but without $@ in pd-ext-- I cannot create an object in an abstraction that has a variable number of args without relying on dynamic patching. In my experience this involved [expr] but there are probably other examples where this technique would come in handy. Additionally, your method of using commas to separate named init values assumes that the pd programmer doesn't want to send commas as arguments (which I did want to do in my [expr] example). So what I'm saying is that your [args] doesn't fit my needs, and $@ wouldn't fit everyone's needs, but $@ + [args] + [other_parsers_as_needed] would fit the maximum number of needs without burdening the users with learning a completely different way of getting args every time they want to do something different with them.
-Jonathan
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