On Sep 4, 2011, at 2:01 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: Mathieu Bouchard <[email protected]>
To: Jonathan Wilkes <[email protected]>
Cc: Chris McCormick <[email protected]>; Miller Puckette <[email protected]
>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, September 4, 2011 1:48 PM
Subject: Re: [PD] (breaking symbols) was Re: find a list of numbers
in a text file
On Sat, 3 Sep 2011, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
It needs to be that simple for the general case because Pd Vanilla
has no
(sensible) mechanism to convert a symbol atom into a float.
Then it needs a sensible mechanism to convert a symbol atom into a
float.
Yes, it does. But if there were one, it'd still be nice to have the
default be float
atoms come out, and maybe a flag or a different creator name for
outputting all
symbols. (Like [symbol explode]?)
Its more than just methods for converting, there needs to be a type
system which includes the possibility that "43" can be a symbol. Pd's
type system is meant to be "anything that can be intepreted as a
number is a float, everything else is a symbol". See this for
definitions:
http://puredata.info/dev/PdDefinitions
So given that is the type system, how do you represent "43" as a
symbol? No matter the techniques for converting anything to a symbol,
it'll remain confusing to use these symbols unless this is resolved.
One possibility is to do a more duck-typing approach. For something
that accepts only symbols, it'll happily accept "43" as a symbol. For
something that only accept floats, it'll convert the symbol "43" to 43
and accept it as a float. The question here is how to handle it when
something expects both floats and symbols. As far as implementing
this, we could add to the t_symbol struct a flag to say whether it can
be read as a float, and store the float value there too.
This would open the door to making arbitrary symbol making really
easy, something like:
[symbol 43(
or
[symbol 43]
.hc
If symbol atoms which look like numbers to the naked eye are going
to start
flying around more freely in Pd then the docs need to explain how
atoms are a
kind of weird file cabinet where the label on the cabinet tells you
which
file-folder inside actually holds the data.
That's called a union or a variant record type or an «any» type or a
sum-type or whatever else.
If it looks weird and/or difficult, it's because it's not taught in a
way that makes it understood as normal.
I think the problem is it's not explicitly taught at all.
Also, I'm assuming [list implode] would accept and process a list at
the left inlet, unlike [s2l] (which passes the 1st element to the
right inlet).
I don't understand. Wouldn't [list implode] correspond to [l2s],
whereas
[list explode] would correspond to [s2l].
That's right, I wrote the wrong one. I have a bad habit of getting
opposites
mixed up-- if I'm not careful I'll create a [max] to output the
greater of two numbers.
_______________________________________________________________________
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray,
Montréal, QC
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