Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] [RFC] Lite OSC API
From: Steve Harris (S.W.Harris_AT_ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jan 27 2004 - 02:35:47 EET
On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 02:58:20 +1100, rd_AT_alphalink.com.au wrote:
> > an integer in scheme? Couldnt the problem be solved by specifying
> > the type explicitly at send time and doing the coercion then? eg:
> >
> > (-> "/foo" "isf" 100 "hello" 100.0)
>
> That is exactly what would be required and it is not at all good. People
> in user space should not have to even know that there are single and
> double precision floating point representations in order to set the
> frequency of an instrument. Especially not from a language
OK, I've thought about this some more and I think I agree with you now. I'l
add type coercion when I have time, should be easy enough.
> In the redundant case the coercion adds one integer comparison to the
> dispatch path per argument, and thoughtful ordering of the coercion
> table should get most common cases in two or three comparisons; it is
> not an expensive operation.
The expense is not an issue, I've just had bad experiences with weakly
typed APIs. In this case, if we only do conversions between different
numerical types I dont see that it will hurt, as long as the corner cases
are handled sensibly.
> And I am still arguing that it is an important aspect of OSC that when a
> synth advertises a '/freq' message, users can be confident that sending
> it 440, whether encoded as a 32bit or 64bit integer, or as a 32bit or 64bit
> float, will likely tune the synth to A440. OSC is in user space, I think it
> would be a pity if synths advertised '/freqi', '/freqh', '/freqf' and '/freqd'
Yes, this is a good point.
- Steve
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Tue Jan 27 2004 - 02:38:35 EET