I am saying two things:
- Without $0 or something similar, the only way to guarantee similar
locality would be through use of $1 or $n -- you would have to manually give each instance an instance number. Sometimes you even want to be able to group instances in the way you suggested. I'm not sure of the history of Pd, but if $0 was implemented after abstractions with arguments, then manually assigning locality was probably necessary.
- Sometimes $0 NEEDS to be inherited (probably as $1 or some such) by
various helper abstractions within a larger, higher-functioning abstraction. This is especially the case with dynamic patching -- imagine, say, a "bell synthesis" patch using a dynamically created bank of enveloped oscillator abstractions. In that case, you'd want each oscillator abstraction to [throw~] to the same [catch~] within the parent "instrument" abstraction. To do this, you could have [catch~ $0-out] within the parent, and [throw $1-out] within each child, while passing the parent's $0 to the children.
So all I'm saying is that $1-$n often plays a really important role in locality, in addition to a number of other things, and to me it seems almost natural to use $0 as an analogy for this role. I personally love the idea of using $0 as the selector of the abstraction -- its name or filename, and $$ as its ID, but too late for that now.
Matt
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Alexandre Porres porres@gmail.com wrote:
hmm, I am sorry, I don't think I got what you meant... could you give an example please? The way I see is that $1...$n are related to the inheritance concept. They could be used inside [send~] & [receive~] objects to force some sort of locality, but you can't really guarantee locality by that, it is just some way around that is not 100% safe, cause if you have [s $1-gain] in an abstraction, and $1 inheriting "A" for instance, a [s A-gain] object in a parent patch (or even on another opened patch) would still get the value globally. cheers alex
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Matt Barber brbrofsvl@gmail.com wrote:
Without $0, one would have to use $1 ... $n for locality. $0 of a parent patch often needs to be passed as $1 to a child for proper locality, for instance, so I don't think they are necessarily THAT different conceptually.
Matt
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Alexandre Porres porres@gmail.com wrote:
Calling this an exception creates the impression, that $1 in a message is the same as in an object.
Hmm, I see you have a point! But I am just used to consider "$0" and "$1, $2 ... $n" different/separate things, being "$0" solely a locality sintax. Putting them as separate concepts I see "$1, $2 ... $n" as two different things wether in messages or objects, and that "$0" is just useless in messages. Anyway, I am cool with what needs to be done in order to put "$0" in messages, I still think it's a bit of an unnecessary hassle, but it ain't that much of a big deal after all. The thing that had no other way around was using the Find feature to actually find them, so I thought about bringing this all up: the hassle and the problem. I now see that uncheking "whole word" in the new version is just another "way around" rather than actually getting the Find feature to look for "$0", or even for the window number once we explicitly tell it which one it is. So, nerverminding about "$0" in messages, I would still make a point here for the Find feature to be able to find "$0", I hope it isn't much hassle getting it to do so. Thanks a bunch folks! Cheers alex
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 8:03 AM, Roman Haefeli reduzierer@yahoo.de wrote:
Am 12.11.09 17:21 schrieb "Alexandre Porres" unter porres@gmail.com:
But I totally disagree, I have been teaching a lot basic Pd around, and people always get confused and think they can just throw "$0" in messages. So I have to state and reinforce that there is an exception that it doesn't work on messages.
Calling this an exception creates the impression, that $1 in a message is the same as in an object.
Without an exception at all, it should be easier to get it, as I understand.
Agreed. But currently, the only thing that makes $0 in a message exceptional is the fact, that it has no meaning at all. Making it be replaced by the canvas identifier wouldn't make it less exceptional at all.
roman
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