local variables evaluation

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

If I have a local variable which holds an expression, it seems I need to do eval("$myvar") to actually get the evaluated expression

I’m wondering, is there any case where an unevaluated local variable is useful?
If not, could you please have it automatically evaluate, so we don’t need to evaluate it wherever it’s used?

Here’s how I intend to use it (local var DAT)

RAWTARGET        /test
TARGET           `ifs(opexists("$RAWTARGET"),"$RAWTARGET","/default"))`

and then I just reference $TARGET where needed and if I wanna change the target, I set the RAWTARGET variable (and am failsafe).

Hope that made sense
Achim

2

Automatically evaluating in every case is dangerous.
Suddenly the variable contents are not what you specified.

In this case, I would insert an evaluate DAT before the ‘variables’ Null DAT.
You could even merge two branches of variables (one evaluated, and one not evaluated).

Rob.

3

… but then I loose the “per variable” cooking >> everything cooks when one variable changes. Any hope that the variable cooking enhancements will get expanded to include an evaluate DAT anytime soon?