Hi,

On the wiki page for Pd it states that the language has no constructor function, which is a routine for creating new objects by accepting arguments as variables. Isn't that essentially the same thing as dynamic object creation? e.g.

[pack f f f...]
|
(objectname $1 $2 $3 ...)
|
[s pd-subpatch]

Please excuse my ignorance on this if that's a stupid question, which it probably is.

There is dynamic patching but I its not officially supported. The iemguts library helps you keep track of everything should you experiment with it. You could consider the drawing instructions a constructor for structs though. And no, its definitely not dumb.

Oh I see what you mean. iemguts/canvasargs and so forth. Thanks for your response

The C API has a constructor-- if you make an external object named "foo", it typically has a constructor named "foo_new" that gets called to instantiate the object.

However, if you write objects in Pd itself-- i.e., abstractions-- there isn't anything that corresponds neatly to "foo_new" above. You can use [loadbang], or [initbang], or several other classes but essentially Pd has already "constructed" the abstraction for you by that point. (For example, you can't choose to break the abstraction due to wrong argument types-- something you can do in "foo_new" for an external.)

EDIT : oops ; my response is exactly your question.