On Sat, 31 Jan 2009, Ingo Scherzinger wrote:
I'm implementing a LCD user interface that has many, many similar pages but the content and also the number of parameters differs on every single page. No way to do it with abstractions!!! So if anything in all of the pages changes it h a s to be copied back to the same place in the other pages!
If any single object or group of objects appears on all of the pages and may have to be changed in the future on all of the pages at once, then you may make an abstraction with it, so that in the future you will have only one file to change. If there are variable numbers of arguments to an object that have to be passed around, though, you might be hitting a limitation of pd.
I totally agree that using abstractions is the more economical way. So actually I do use abstractions where it makes sense of course. However, this doesn't eliminate the need of making "similar" copies of sub patches and copying objects from one to the other.
Sure that the pd abstraction concept has lots of limitations, but also many limitations are in the way that we think about the usefulness of abstractions. It can even make sense to make an abstraction containing a single object, for example, though it is probably often taught that abstractions are meant to reduce the number of objects you have to look at. Or perhaps you've been taught that abstractions are meant for things that are not going to change in the future, whereas they can also be used for abstracting out things that *will* change in the future, or so that you can pass a patch as an argument to an instance of another abstraction...
There's always one more way to use abstractions that hasn't been thought about yet, and which will look weird once it's finally used, but which will survive because it's simply useful for some purpose... any purpose.
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