Alexandre Porres wrote:
hmm, I am sorry, I don't think I got what you meant... could you give an example please?
The way I see is that $1...$n are related to the inheritance concept. They could be used inside [send~] & [receive~] objects to force some sort of locality, but you can't really guarantee locality by that, it is just some way around that is not 100% safe, cause if you have [s $1-gain] in an abstraction, and $1 inheriting "A" for instance, a [s A-gain] object in a parent patch (or even on another opened patch) would still get the value globally.
A frequent pd design pattern is to have a subpatch that wants to, for example, tell its own subpatch about a unique array name or receive or receive~ object.
The way this is commonly done is to make $0 of the subpatch the first argument to the subpatch's subpatch.