You might want to have a look at Jamie Bullock's abstraction based solution(which also went out on this list). Which was quite eloquent, if a little limiting at first. It's a little way back from the dream of dropping lines of OO code into pd but it's the kind of thing, when I find a syntax I like for this, could be useful to streamline some of my patching. 

I suppose what I'd really like is embedded ruby in pd, but that's either going to be a case of some serious modification (a bit beyond me now) or possibly shell scripts, something like

[loadbang]

|

[irb, pitch = 440, *other variables*(

|

[shell]

*number*

|

[pitch = $1{

| 

[shell]

[pitch * 2{

|

[shell]

|

[osc~]

Although I suspect this may convolute issues more than solving them. Although in theory it might simplify some logic blocks...

[if pitch > 10000,

volume = .05,

elsif pitch > 5000,

volume = .1,

else,

volume = .15,

end(

|

[shell]

I'm really not sure if this is worth pursuing or not. It might lead to some impressive results, especially if I could define some methods in a ruby file and call them via shell, meaning I could write a parallel ruby library for a pd project. 

The main problem I can see would be requesting live feedback from ruby. Would probably have to poll a whole lot of variables quite regularly for irb to deal with it. 

All casting about ideas here, guys, but any ideas or guidance might be helpful. 

Cheers

Andrew