--- On Thu, 8/19/10, Miller Puckette <ms...@ucsd.edu> wrote:

They definitely are very different.

As for [initbang] - my only use has been for making abstractions that can spawn a variable number of inlets/outlets.  That's the only way I've used it and the only way I've ever seen it used-- if there are other uses maybe someone else on this list can give an example.

The [initbang] object gives abstractions the ability to do something that otherwise would only be possible by coding an external in another programming language.  For example, with [initbang] I can quickly make an abstraction that can act like Max/MSP's [trigger] object-- where you can specify numeric values as arguments ( like [trigger b 0] ).

The addition of initbang would be a rather restricted ugliness, since a) neither [loadbang] nor [initbang] have an inlet (and therefore must always be at the head of an object chain), and b) both have a single outlet that sends a single message, and that message is a bang in both cases.

If future compatibility is the issue, and if the current [initbang] is to be a subset of the features of future [loadbang], wouldn't it be fairly straightforward to make [initbang] an alias of future [loadbang] (like a shortcut to whatever args you have to give future [loadbang] to get the functionality of current [initbang])?

-Jonathan