On Sat, 19 Jun 2010, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

2009-03-14, quoting Miller: "Anyhow, I'm trying to think of a better mechanism for allowing abstractions to have variable numbers of inlets/outlets, so I'm hoping initbang won't be necessary in the long run."

If he were really trying, he would have found something or would have asked for advice. But no.

There's also a problem with always waiting for the best solution at the expense of finding a solution at all, NOW, or five years ago.

I'd like to ask: what is the problem with [initbang] as it is, and what would a "better mechanism" look like?

Whatever it is, it can't be supporting variable number of signals. What I thought about, is that you could have a [inlets] just like GF's [receives] that does multiple-receive. You first get the receive-symbol from the right outlet, the actual content from the left outlet. For [inlets] it would be the same, except you get an inlet-number out of the right-outlet. It's the only way you can do it without dynamic-patching. That's a cool solution, but it also doesn't support signals at all.

Thus you still need [initbang] and dynamic patching.

Are there any other reasons to use [initbang] ? I can't think of any, but I have the impression that I'm forgetting about something.

Well, actually, you can send to a toplevel iemgui's receive-symbol at loadbang-time, but you can send to an abstraction's receive-symbol at loadbang-time ONLY WHEN the receive-symbol is not computed at loadbang-time. Else the loadbang-order will not be reliable.

It took me a while to think of that one, but it makes me believe that we'd eventually hit limitations and have to do weird workarounds because of those limitations if there's no [initbang], for things not related to variable number of inlets.

If a "better mechanism" is not currently in the works, could these two objects be included in pd-vanilla so that in the meantime people can make abstractions that have dynamic numbers of inlets/outlets that will work on both versions of pd?

do you have Miller's phone number ?

(I've never used [closebang] but I imagine the same reasoning holds for it as well.)

[closebang] would be usually used for wholly different reasons. All the examples for [closebang] are unrelated to why pd needs [initbang]. The only reason why they're put together, is because they are two classes that are related to loadbang as all three send a bang at a specific special moment.

It looks like the discussion just stopped, and I couldn't find any threads on user or dev list.

What can you say more, on stuff that gets rejected without proper feedback, or ignored, for years ? At this point I would just say :

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:WOF-aaa.jpg

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/AAAAA

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