Hi All,

I was thinking today that as a way to cut down global variables in
projects of mine it would be nice to have some sort of static
instrument variables that would be only viewable in scope by and
instrument, but also would be shareable by all instances of that
instrument.  Some usages of this idea off the top of my head would be:

-Instrument wide volume adjustments
-ftables that an instrument may depend on but doesn't need to generate
on every new instance (ftgen could be used and the number stored in an
i-time var), this would allow embedding ftables an instrument depends
on with an instrument

It would be nice to have something that was in the syntax of the
language itself, but knowing what I know of what's underneath, this
would be complicated and probably not necessary.

What I am thinking of instead is something a bit more generic but
could be used for the above purpose.  The idea is that one would use
invalue and outvalue, which can work with string names, and an id
system for one's instrument.  If your instrument requires an ftable,
instead of putting it out in global scope with ftgen or and
f-statement in the score, you could check with invalue to see if it's
been defined (invalue nicely defaults to 0 if no value is assigned),
and if not, define the table using ftgen.  Something like:

Stable1 = "myInstrument_tab1"
Stable2 = "myInstrument_tab1"

itab1 invalue Stable1
itab2 invalue Stable2

if (itab1 <= 0) then
  itab1 ftgen ... ; define a table here
  outvalue Stable1, itab1
endif

if (itab2 <= 0) then
  itab2 ftgen ... ; define a table here
  outvalue Stable2, itab2
endif

Now, I think invalue doesn't work with S strings (need to check), and
that might be fine if you want to statically read in from a string
channel name (i.e. itab1 invalue "myinstrument_tab1"), but being able
to concatenate the instrument id of the instrument:

i_instr_id = int(abs(p1))
Stable1 concat "myInstrument_tab1_", i_instr_id

might make it a bit more robust to overlapping instruments, especially
if you're using two copies of the instrument with different instrument
id's, you could control them independently.

Has anyone tried anything like this, or perhaps has a better method?

Thanks,
steven
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