On 04/03/2014 03:13 PM, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:

thanks for explaining it all

> imagine trying to design something like that 

> which is also backwards compatible with the

> crude namespacing tools that already exist in Pd.

>  It's not possible

ok, here's where I'm a bit confuse. You're not saying it'd be impossible to make messages inherit the $0 value, are you?

I don't know how difficult such a change is.  I assume something in Pd's parser would need to be changed.  I can't remember if the code responsible for parsing a msg box message even knows where the message got sent from-- seems ike it doesn't since I can't "find last error" on msg-box parsing errors (like an out-of-range dollarsign variable).

What I'm saying is that even with a canvas $0 inside message boxes Pd's scope system is still way too clunky.  You still don't get straightforward subpatch-locality, nor nested-abstraction locality.  I think Tim Blechmann's Nova system did both, and Ivica's [preset_hub] and [preset_node] get the latter (though I don't think it does global scope).  Both work perfectly fine with no $0 at all.  The pedagogical benefit is enormous-- new users can get the scope they want without having to learn or think about what a dollarsign variable is, or how string concatenation works.  In the case of [preset_hub], just creating the object sets the scope boundary almost certainly to what the user wants it to be.  I like that.

-Jonathan