On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Thu, 19 Nov 2009, Matt Barber wrote:
I think this might underline how useful it would be for those of us who use vanilla Pd to have some symbol manipulation tools in vanilla,
It's useless to underline it more than it's been underlined before. Just stop using vanilla. This fixes the problem.
I agree -- I don't use vanilla myself, but I know a lot of people do. As you suggest it's useful for testing the limits -- the sorting algorithms I implemented a year ago ([list-shellsort] in list-abs is one of them) are in this class of objects. I also think they're useful for teaching students who are intimidated by written code (almost all of my students are classically-trained composers) some things about algorithmic thinking.
By "underlining," I mean sometimes you don't know just how badly it's missing until you try to do it in Pd and check the results against the compiled libraries. [list-l2s] will never be as fast as [list2symbol] from zexy... etc.
MB
Games like you've done can be fun though. I've had fun with the [list-drip] speed hacks in february. But it was only a game. In real life I use [foreach], which is written in C++, and it works fine and faster than what's possible to do as a regular Pd patch. The game was only for testing limits and demonstrating unusual techniques (i mean techniques that are unusual in the context of pd; they may be commonplace in some other programming language).