On Mar 28, 2009, at 5:32 AM, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 10:42:25AM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
No, this was about how [expr] can be a replacement for even a small network of objects. If you make an abstraction that does ($f1-$f2)*($f5-$f4)/($f3-$f2)+$f4, with just [+] [-] [*] [/] for
example, then if you change some things in the cold inlets, the changes
might not propagate to the bottom. This means you have to add a [pack 0 0 0 0
0] of the whole thing and [unpack 0 0 0 0 0] to ensure every hot-inlet is retriggered in the proper order. Actually, in this pack/unpack dance, maybe you can skip the hot-inlet of the abstraction (?), but apart
from that, you're pretty stuck using pack/unpack if you want life to be simple. Else you can weave a mess of [t b f] objects like a spider on caffeine. That's what I mean.When I was thinking about writing a general purpose dataflow
programming language which addresses some of Pd's shortcomings, I did a lot of
thinking about the hot and cold inlet paradigm. What I came up with was the
following scheme:
Hot inlets are red
Cold inlets are blue
Neutral inlets are grey
A class has a default hot/cold/neutral inlet configuration defined
by the author.
- The UI allows the user to change the hot/cold/neutral status of
inlets.
- An instance's 'run' method is executed when any of the following
conditions are met:
- Every cold inlet has been pinged (receives data)
- Any hot inlet has been pinged (receives data)
- Inlets cache their last received data if no new data arrives.
In Pd, DSP inlets act like the 'cold' inlets above, message inlets
which aren't the leftmost message inlet [usually] act like 'neutral' inlets
above, and the leftmost inlet [usually] acts like 'hot' inlets above.I like the idea of this behaviour being defined by the class author,
but (re)configurable by the user.
Sounds like an interesting idea, its something more like how vvvv
works. For me, I make sense of vvvv by thinking of it as Pd with only
tilde objects, no message objects.
.hc
¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!