On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
with care to prefix with the "visual", but of course it doesn't even have to be that interface. The thing that is really Puredata is the bit we dont see, the engine plugging together and executing the objects. In that way it's like a bytecode
hmm, i would rather say that the _language_ Pd is the thing we DO see, and not the interpreter that is executing it.
I would say that the pd language is both the .pd file format and the visual representation for it; that one is a "purely written form" while another is a "drawn form". It's similar to how languages have both a written form and a spoken form, but instead distinguishing between two kinds of visual form: one that works just by sign sequences... words, sentences, paragraphs, in a one-dimensional sequence; and one that works by drawing two-dimensional relationships between elements.
I could make various kinds of diagrams (entity-relationship, ...) out of English or French sentences, and I could argue that those diagrams are a form of the English or French language. (the same would hold for most any human language).
If you think of the C/C++ language, it's largely a free-form language: with some exceptions, the whitespace is ignored. In that sense it's written in a one-dimensional way. However, that's not how people write C/C++: they use indentation and lots of linebreaks. Those things are using the two-dimensional space. However there are higher degrees of utilisation of the two-dimensional space, e.g. PureData.
I tend to format my C/C++ code in a more two-dimensional way than other people, which can piss them off; it also renders automatic reformatters useless/harmful, as they would destroy some visual information in my code.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada