It's lame, but the idea behind the original design of "pack/unpack" was to have the argument lists look the same. So, to send a variety of (known-type) data down a send/receive channel or whatnot, one could use "pack tea for 2" and a corresponding "unpack tea for 2".
Of course, that in the unpack side, only the types were significant, is stylistically wierd. It just seemed less wierd than any other idea I had at the time.
cheers M
On Sun, Jul 22, 2007 at 03:41:02PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Sun, 22 Jul 2007, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Actually a thought occured to me: If the arguments of [unpack] should not also specify their types, why do we have these arguments at all?
[...]
So instead of [unpack 0 0 0] an [unpack 3] would create an unpack with 3 outlets for any kind of atom. But as this of course is damn incompatible with old patches, a new class name should be used.
I have no idea why pd is like that, except that it conveniently enlarges the box as a way to compensate for the problem that the size of the object box isn't taking the number of in/outlets in advance. (DesireData ensures that the box is wide enough, by looking at the number of in/outlets)
I agree that changing the behaviour of pd's unpack to be like jmax's, is going to be damn incompatible.
A candidate for this would be an "unpack method" for [list] like [list unpack 3].
So far I agree about [list unpack 3].
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - t?l:+1.514.383.3801, Montr?al QC Canada
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