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diff --git a/doc/misc/pdp_forth.html b/doc/misc/pdp_forth.html deleted file mode 100644 index 0f39fd2..0000000 --- a/doc/misc/pdp_forth.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,94 +0,0 @@ -<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> -<html> - <head> - <title>PDP Forth Scripting</title> - </head> - - <body> - <h1>PDP Forth Scripting</h1> - <h2>Introduction</h2> - - <p> This document describes the rationale behind the pdp forth scripting - language, aka "pdp's rpn calculator". - - - <p>The point is to be able to decouple the packet processors from the pd - object model, in order to be able to port the functional part of pdp to other - systems. Therefore pdp needs its own processor model. - - <p>A requirement for this is that it is both flexible and simple. pd's object - model is very flexible, but it is hard to port to other architextures, because - of the tight bindings to the pd kernel. What is needed is a way to abstract the - functionality of a packet processor in such a way that a pd class can be - generated from the pdp processor model. - - <p>There are a lot of ways to solve this problem. One is to extend a packet - class to support methods. This seems like a very clean solution, however - when a processor has more than one packet as internal state, this poses - a problem. It would require to define an operation like biquad (which has 1 input - packet and 2 extra state packets) as a method of a packet collection. To - do this properly requires a much more advanced object model, or a separate - object model for processors. - - - <p>In short: it is not always clear if a packet processor can be seen as a metod - 'of' or an operation 'on' a single packet, so extending a packet with methods - would require a separate packet processor class anyway. Therefore we do not - define packet operations as methods of packets. (no object oriented solution) - - <p>Another approach is to write operators in a pure functional way: a processor - accepts a list of arguments and returns a new list of arguments. To do this - cleanly it would require the calling style to be pass by value: i.e. the arguments - passed will not be modified themselves. Since most of the image processors in - pdp all use in place processing for performance reasons, this would require - a lot of workarounds or a big kludge mixing const and non const references - (like it would be done in C++). - - <p>Since one of the goals is to automate - the generation of wrappers of pdp processors (i.e. pd classes, python classes, - scheme functions, ...) the interface can best be kept as simple as possible. - (no pure functional solution) - - <p>The most natural solution, given the underlying code base, seems to be to embrace - an in place processing approach. What comes to mind is to use a data stack to solve - the communication problem. I.e. the forth language model. A packet operation is then - a forth word that manipulates a data stack. A data stack is nothing more than a list - of atoms containing the basic data building blocks: floats, ints, symbols and packets. - - <p>An additional advantage is that dataflow and forth mix very well. This would enable - the possibility to create new words by chaining old ones, without the disadvantage - that pd abstractions using pdp objects have: passive packets are contained in internal processor - registers longer than necessary, leading to inefficient memory usage. - - <p>Several practical problems need to be solved to implement this. The first being - description of the stack effect. Each primitive word has a mandatory description of - the number of stack elements it consumes and produces. - - <P>The forth words will support - polymorphy: each word has a type template to describe the type of atoms it can operate - on. The type is determined by some word on the stack, or a symbol indicating the type for - generators. - - <p>To solve the additional problem of mapping forth words to processors, the concept - of a forth process is introduced. A forth process has a stack (representing it's - state), an init method that constructs a stack, a process method that operates - on the stack and some description of how to map inputs to stack and stack to output. - - <p>There is one last class of objects that don't fit the forth description - very well: it is the input/output classes. These will probably stay as special - cases, since they really need an internal state represented as an object, - incorporating them into the system would require them to be defined as an - object (quicktime packet, v4l packet, xv packet, ...). More later. - - <h2>Implementation</h2> - Have a look at <code>pdp_forth.h</code> - - - <hr> - <address><a href="mailto:no@spam">Tom Schouten</a></address> -<!-- Created: Sun Jun 8 17:42:50 CEST 2003 --> -<!-- hhmts start --> -Last modified: Mon Jun 9 13:41:09 CEST 2003 -<!-- hhmts end --> - </body> -</html> |