I am not proposing to limit the use of dollar args in message boxes
for dynamic sends, that is a very useful feature. The example you give
here, though, is an example of a shortcut for typing, there is no
other benefit that I can see.
And at the risk of sounding pedantic, I am going to quote one of my
favorite ideas relating to code: "Programs should be written for
people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute".
Typing shortcuts like this message box below almost never save time
when you look at the whole picture. Code is read far more times than
it is written, so really we should be optimizing for reading rather
than writing.
In Pd, [trigger] is the central mechanism for specifying execution
order. Therefore, in the interest of readability, [trigger] should be
used as much as possible.
Clearer documentation of the messages boxes would also be a great
thing. But you almost anything without ever using a semi-colon in a
message box, they are mostly used as a typing shortcut, and many
people are confused by them, so I think we should really be limiting
them to things like dynamic sends, since that is hard to do in other
ways.
.hc
On Mar 20, 2009, at 1:32 AM, dmotd wrote:
hmm.. generally this could be a good idea, but message sending is
most useful
when initialising a number of receives ie:
[loadbang]
|
|; init-1 6 /
|; init-2 symbol foo |
|; init-3 -2 \
which is far more elegant than the the trigger/send replacement,
especially
with more fields..
i think its important for students to recognise that this feature of
messaging
has a role to play, rather than trying to veil its use. in my
experience
people will tend to use [send foo] more often when they start pd,
then begin
abbreviating to [s foo] before they appreciate the msg shorthand [;
foo[. but
you are right it is a little confusing for new users..
perhaps this just needs clearer documenting? 'what does a semi-colon
at the
start of a message mean?' in the FAQ?
dmotd
On Friday 20 March 2009 10:38:06 Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
Here's something that I'd like to propose for the style guide, based
on my teaching experience:
- use [send foo] instead of [; foo( for all sends that aren't
dynamically set
A lot of people find the [; foo( syntax confusing, and since it is
commonly used, it often gets in the way of newbies understanding the
patch. While the [; foo( syntax is definitely useful for dynamic
sends, I don't think there is an advantage to using for the regular
sends. So for example:
[dsp 1(
[send pd]
instead of
|; /
|pd dsp 1 \
This change highlights the dataflow aspect of the messages over the
text-style programming with syntax of the message box. At the very
least, I think that the help patches should use this style, and I
have
started to use this style in my regular programming and it feels
quite
natural once you are used to it. I find it easier to read.
(as for [s foo] versus [send foo] that's an issue I want to avoid in
this discussion).
.hc
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