I am new to Pd

I have now written a few patches and when developing /editing them I find myself getting confused between sub-patches and abstractions. When editing a subpatch then only thing letting you know its a subpatch is that on the window heading the title does not have the .pd extension - when you save or save as, it applies to the whole patch. Also any changes only affect the one instance of the subpatch if it occurs multiple times on your patch.

On the other hand changing an abstraction might have unintended consequences in other patches using it, so I tend to keep renaming every-time I edit and end up with multiple versions, which gets confusing.

Is there anyway to make the distinction between a sub-patch and abstractions clearer?

(using Purr data 2.9.0 on Windows 10)

@JJLloyd Maybe there is with Purr Data....... but I don't know.
The purpose of using abstractions is to use arguments to make each copy behave differently.
In Pd under windows those arguments show up in the window name in brackets after the abstraction name........ which is a good clue.
You could give all your sub-patches and abstractions GOP windows and colour them differently with a canvas though....... like this.zip
David.

@whale-av Thanks David

I have been using Purr-data, but just had a look at Pure Data (0.49.0). This does have useful feature under the window menu that shows the open windows with subpatches / abstractions indented. But I can't see any arguments listed.

Purr data doesn't list the open windows - as far as I can see. It would be useful if it did

Jim

@whale-av Following up on this I have been trying to understand abstractions and arguments better. I have looked at your very helpful tutorial: https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/9774/pure-data-noob togther with the example at the bottom of that thread. One thing puzzles me though - how do you write an abstraction so that if arguments are omitted in the object box they still have defined default values? What values do $1, $2, $3 etc take when they are not defined in the object box (but appear in the abstraction).

Jim

@JJLloyd You could do something like this.zip
The default values are banged in, and only replaced if there are arguments.
The default values are banged through first though even when there are arguments, which might be a problem.
And of course this does not help with other objects that contain a $ as they will return a value "0".
[symbol $1] will send an empty symbol....... [send $1-volume] will become [send 0-volume]

However, $0 is not specified by a creation argument and does have a default value which is different for each abstraction.
But that is it....... you only get the one $0 to use.
David.

@whale-av Thanks David - I think I was coming to a similar conclusion. This is fine unless you actually wanted to pass 0 as an argument, but I don't think there is any way around that. See attached

abstraction-jjl.pd abstraction-help-jjl.pd

... and I can't work out how to use a similar method for symbols. In other words how do you use [select] or [route] when the symbol you are trying to select for is the empty symbol? - how is the empty symbol represented?

@JJLloyd Well...... it gets more complex.......
this.zip
........ as you need to get rid of the "symbol" selector so that the empty symbol is ignored.
It is converted into just a bang which is then sidelined with [route symbol bang]
You need the [s2l] and [s2f] for Vanilla..... for extended you do not.
David.

@whale-av Thanks again.

Not sure if I fully understand, but I can see how it works. I have incorporated into my example:

abstraction-jjl.pd abstraction-help-jjl.pd