Hi everyone,
    Thanks for the feedback on the timing discussion; I do feel that was
    useful. At some point, it may even be worth writing up a canonical
    answer there, alongside some tests. This still leaves me puzzling
    over some questions, though, in terms of sequencing events in real
    time - forgetting, for a moment, even those timing implications.
    
    Let's imagine you have an interface scheduling events from another
    language, and Pd as an engine (increasingly common with libpd)
    processing those events.
    
    textfile and qlist each do this, qlist tending to be the more
    convenient. Then you can send messages to whatever apparatus you
    have for actually processing events and make sound.
    
    But what would be the most efficient way to send events to those
    objects for future scheduling? 
    
    qlist seems to be built for the purpose, but two issues:
    1. qlist seems confused when there's no text file - and in libpd (or
    really any real-time process), writing to a textfile seems
    meaningless.
    2. qlist would require sending every event - not an entire sequence
    - one at a time, since it can't process lists.
    
    With textfile, I can add a list, but then the list gets stored
    entirely as one message - which means to iterate through the list, I
    have to again split it into individual items.
    
    Maybe that's okay, and that's really the most Pd-like way of doing
    things.
    
    But if you were using Pd as an interactive music engine, you'd be
    concerned about:
    1. efficiency of messages
    2. real-time performance
    
    Should I assume that this will likely deliver adequate timing and
    press on with this basic method? Is there any particular advantage
    beyond convenience of one or the other?
    
    Or is there another method that I'm missing?
    
    I'm particularly interested in this as I imagine I'll be answering
    this same question with others a lot, and I don't want to endorse
    anything less than a best-practices solution.
    
    Peter
    
    PETER KIRN
    http://createdigitalmusic.com | http://createdigitalmotion.com
    PhD Candidate, CUNY Graduate Center
    Adjunct Faculty, Parsons The New School for Design