Once again, I(we've discussed this before) it seems that there is an urgent name/concept-convention need. 

Just brainstorming, but a nice exercise would be:

concept           meaning   dev     user       some thoughts
abstraction       ?            ?          ?            (seems the most easy one)
class               ?            ?          ?            (should be a class definition?)
object              ?            ?          ?            (corresponds to a visual object in the gui? no matter if it is external or abstraction?)
external           ?            ?          ?            (seems easy too)


best regards,
Pedro

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Mathieu Bouchard <matju@artengine.ca> wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2011, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

A false dichotomy is made between abstractions and externals.

Such a false dichotomy is also used on the front page of http://puredata.info/ :

 « It is easy to extend Pd by writing object classes ("externals") or
   patches ("abstractions"). »

I say that even though at the implementation level, abstractions aren't classes, for the user, it works like a class.
  
Also there are many externals that don't include abstractions but are nonetheless compatible with Pd vanilla.

What part of the text are you referring to, in particular ?

BTW, http://en.flossmanuals.net/PureData/Abstractions talks about "external patches", but given how "external" is being overwhelmingly used with a totally different meaning in Pd. (are newbies supposed to have to guess ?)

"word or symbol" creates a false dichotomy.

what about the occurrence of "selector-word" in the Messages page ?

Also: it isn't made clear what is special about list messages as opposed to, say, blueberry messages, which I define as starting with the word blueberry followed by zero or more atoms*.

mmm, blueberries. :)

 _______________________________________________________________________
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC

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--
Pedro Lopes (MSc)
contact: pedro.lopes@ist.utl.pt
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