Mathieu,
I'm sorry to say that you have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. So please don't make unnecessary comments like this one.
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!
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.
Ingo
On Sat, 31 Jan 2009, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Sat, 31 Jan 2009, Ingo Scherzinger wrote:
I agree with pasting to the same window the cursor position would be the best solution. But please leave it the way it is for different windows. I always copy objects that have been changed to almost identical windows and they are right in the spot where they belong. Changing this behaviour would be very annoying if you're doing things like this.
I believe that in general you shouldn't have to make copy-paste like that, and a language is called "powerful" when it allows you to avoid the copy-paste and instead replace it with a more concise description of what's going on. In Pd this is made using something called "abstractions".
But Pd not being so powerful in that sense of the word, there are also many situations where you have to copy-paste, and many situations where it's simpler to copy-paste than to try to contort the thing into something abstractable the pd way. There are also situations that are not really worth abstracting in any language.
If you already know all of this, I'm sorry to say it, and in any case, I can only hope that some people will benefit from this email...
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.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec
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Ingo Scherzinger -
Mathieu Bouchard