Hallo, Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Sun, 22 Jul 2007, Miller Puckette wrote:
But to return to the original question, if my 'improvement' of pack destroys the nice symmetry of pack and unpack arguments, this certainly calls the design of unlack into question, since the only reason its arguments are as they are is that they were designed so in the context of a no-longer-extant pack.
Is symmetry so important?
Why is it that leftmost inlet is special, not only in terms of implementation (the object _is_ its own left inlet except in case of NOINLET) but also that it is the 'active' inlet for most classes? Because there's no special built-in outlet in those same objects...
Hm, but mostly there is, at least "kind of": The hot left-most inlet corresponds to the right-to-left triggering of many objects.
[unpack] | / [pack]
will fire only once because of this. In general this convention leads to the "oriental" right-to-left reading direction one often uses when deciphering Pd-patches.
Why are some classes using the reverse order? [timer], [realtime], [cputime]. For those objects, messages need to be sent left-to-right; the rightmost inlet triggers output.
It's likely because of the nice symmetry in the following common idiom to get inter-onset intervals:
[t b b] | | [timer]
[timer] (and its relatives to some extent) is an object that is used in a hot-to-cold fashion more often than in the cold-to-hot direction common with most other objects like [pack] etc.
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__