[Dev] 'get' revisited

[Stephen Sinclair]

Hi Jamie,

I do agree that it's not strictly necessary, except that I think maybe 
it's more semantically explicit to use "get".
Personally (in some non-Integra work) I've been using /get with an 
argument to specify a timer interval at which the value should be 
auto-reported.

So, if I wanted the position of an object every 10 ms, I would send a 
message like this:

/object/theobj/position/get 10

And to stop the stream,

/object/theobj/position/get 0

But if I want the object's position just once, I'd send:

/object/theobj/position/get (no argument)

So that's the only use I can see where /get is really necessary.  Of 
course, there may just as well have been other ways to think about 
this.. for example, I could have appended /get to the beginning of the 
message instead, so that I could route them early on to some "getter" 
object responsible for handling my timer interval: 
/get/object/theobj/position

One thing to consider is how this might interact with the OSC-route 
object in Max.  Of course we shouldn't cater too much to specific 
implementations, but OSC-route doesn't make it so easy to differentiate 
between messages with different numbers of arguments.  The output of 
OSC-route would have to go into a "zl len" object to figure out the 
number of arguments, which would perhaps control a select object, etc..  
No nearly as clean as simply adding an argument to OSC-route.

Also, what would happen for messages with no arguments?  These do 
exist.. events and such.  For example, a granular synth I made takes a 
message that causes it to release the sustain on its volume envelope.  
Granted, there aren't all that many examples, but it's certainly a 
possible case to consider.

Just some thoughts.  By the way, did you attach your example?  I don't 
see it attached to the email.


Cheers,
Steve


Jamie Bullock wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I think this is probably a rather minor issue, but I thought I would
> raise it anyhow because it's bugging me!
>
> Why do we need any kind of 'get' syntax appended to an OSC address to
> get the value that is assigned to a variable? This syntax (or absence of
> syntax) seems much cleaner to me:
>
> /x 20 (sends the integer 20 to the address /x)
> /x (returns the value previously sent to the address /x, in Integra
> terms '/x: 20')
>
> I have attached an example using the canonical integra.linfunc module to
> illustrate this. It uses a simple helper abstraction [getsetf] to do the
> work.
>
> BTW: [integra.linfunc2] also fixes the typos in the .get implementation,
> and replaces the expensive call to sprintf.
>
> Jamie
>
>
>
>
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