--- On Thu, 4/1/10, IOhannes m zmoelnig zmoelnig@iem.at wrote:
From: IOhannes m zmoelnig zmoelnig@iem.at Subject: Re: [PD] propertybang-help To: "Jonathan Wilkes" jancsika@yahoo.com Cc: "pd-list" PD-list@iem.at Date: Thursday, April 1, 2010, 7:31 PM On 2010-04-01 18:11, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
That's currently the problem with your help
patch. The behavior of the
object is clear from the usage description, but then
you decide to put
"per abstraction" in all caps, which made me wonder
whether you mean
"per abstraction instance"-- the desired behavior-- or
"per abstraction class"-- in which case I would take it to mean right-clicking one instance
sends a bang to _all_ instances. Then you said
at the bottom that "you
it does the "desired" behaviour.
cannot have [propertybang]s per subpatch," which
confirms the latter (see
"2.7. subpatches"),
"subpatch" in the help patch means what is commonly called "subpatch" (aka [pd]) which is a "one-off subpatch" in the docs.
which would render the object useless and make
me
think it's just not finished yet. So I have to
build my own abstraction
and test the object to see whether the it does
something useful, which
defeats the whole purpose of having the help patch in
the first place.
i cannot follow. i don't like help-patches that are not self-contained (at least for what they are trying to document); in older versions [propertybang] obviously did not work for "one-off subpatches" (hence the documentation about this), which made it a bit hard to show without abstractions. otoh, creating an abstraction yourself and test whether the object indeed does what _you_ want it do, is not so complicated.
The vast majority of help patches are self-contained (excluding for the moment those that have objects from other libraries which may or may not exist). For those few patches that warrant an abstraction in the example, it's easier (on the reader of the subpatch) to include an example abstraction than to describe what the behavior would be were an abstraction included (which may or may not be up to date). Right-clicking "Properties" on one [foo] object and noticing that a bang does not come out a different [foo] object takes a few seconds to comprehend, unlike your "PER ABSTRACTION" paragraph which takes a message to a mailing list and revisions to correct/clarify the meaning.
Also, please note that I'm talking about about an example of the core behavior of [propertybang], not an example of how it might be useful in a real (albeit simplified) patch. Only the latter belong in the "examples" folder. I.e., "5.reference" = what it does, "examples" = how it might be used.
-Jonathan