sorry for this stupid question, I guess you'll all put your hands on your heads, but
what's the difference between externals, abstractions and libraries?
thx...

An abstraction is a patch you make yourself (if you like). It's just an ordinary Pd patch saved in a file.

An external is compiled, so you cant look inside it. You need the C compiler to make them. An external performs one function and is just one object that you can place on a canvas, like [abs~] for example, which gives the magnitude of an audio signal.

A library is a collection of externals rolled into one. When you load that library you have access to a whole collection of new things.

There are also intrinsics, te things built into Pd like [osc~] and [metro] that can't be found as separate objects anywhere.

And there are sub-patches of course, which don't exist outside the patch file you are working on.

@obiwannabe said:

An external is compiled, so you cant look inside it. You need the C compiler to make them. An external performs one function and is just one object that you can place on a canvas, like [abs~] for example, which gives the magnitude of an audio signal.

So for example [invert] is considered also a external?

well, it is an intrinsic..

[invert] isn't intrinsic, at least not in the vanilla source tree. It just doesn't have a help file because it's so obvious I suppose.

btw, is that salad in your avatar, it always makes me hungy

a.

@obiwannabe said:

[invert] isn't intrinsic,

So, what is it? a external?

That salad is mine, I will not give you anything...:)

Yeah, its a GEM object AFAIK

However, worth noting that some things exist as separate external objects and later get put in libraries, or t'other way about, which is cause of namespace weirdness if you update things pice by piece from old releases. But it's rare and generally most people think very carefully before naming an external or adding to a library, pd-extended is very well maintained in this respect considering how many external objects and abstractions do more or less the same thing. [counter] is one notable offender.

[invert] is actually the same as just using [== 0] , if the input is zero then that's true, so the output is 1

How do you keep the salad so fresh?

a.