On Sun, 13 Feb 2011, Pedro Lopes wrote:

Love the syntax of [#downscale_by 3 smoothly]You are almost talking to pd (natural lang) :D

I'm using the old syntax, which said that $2 can be either 'smoothly', or omitted. This is after parens-parsing, thus in :

[#downscale_by (3 4) smoothly]

$1 = 3 4, for anamorphic downscaling, $2 = smoothly

The new syntax is very similar, actually, but I always forget to use it :

[#downscale_by 3, smoothly]

The difference is that in this case, it counts as there is nothing after $1, and that "smoothly" is taken to be like a loadbanged messagebox, thus, "smoothly" is also a selector, and a message without argument.

In turn, this corresponds to a first-inlet method named "smoothly", that does take one argument, but it's optional, AND its default value is 1, not 0. (in GF, all on/off attributes have their variable default to off, but their method default to on).

Finally, sending a "get" message to nearly any GF object will output its attributes out of the rightmost outlet, thus in the case of [#downscale_by], it will output either "smoothly 0" (not smooth) or "smoothly 1" (smooth).

In some ways, giving a method to each attribute is like verbing a noun, as a method is a kind of verb, and an attribute is a kind of noun, but what's special with [#downscale_by] is that I've nouned an adjective ! (and it's now a verb too, of course).

There's room for more of this kind of wordplay.

| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC