On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Frank Barknecht wrote:
But you may remember proposals by Matju IIRC to introduce inlet arguments to specify which inlet should be at which position. I think, that was an idea carried over from jMax.
Yes, that's straight from jMax. That means [inlet],[outlet] would work more like [r],[s] but with nonnegative integer arguments: if inlet/outlet numbers are duplicated then it's like when [r]/[s] symbols are duplicated (but always local to the subpatch/abstr of course!). The number of inlets/outlets is the biggest index plus 1, supposing the indices start at 0 as it is in both Pd's file format and jMax's [inlet]/[outlet] objects (and jMax file format of course). An alternative that I thought about is to skip unused numbers, to prevent creation of 1000000 inlets by just making one [inlet 1000000]. Then the number of inlets would be the total number of [inlet] objects minus duplicate indices.
Anyways I generally prefer the explicit approach Pd uses most of the time.
It's generally better for dynamic patch creation. It's very much possible getting used to the fact that positions are useless for all objectboxes except [inlet] and [outlet], but then it may add complications in our patches in order to deal with it. I always think about that sort of thing because my dream is always of making patches that contain nothing and that do everything, and short of being able to do that (heh), the minimum necessary is the maximum i aim for (usually), but of course, that's all relative to the feature set I want.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada