On 01/21/2014 11:23 AM, Funs Seelen wrote:
On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:02 AM, IOhannes m zmölnig <zmoel...@iem.at
<mailto:zmoel...@iem.at>> wrote:
On 01/20/2014 10:01 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>
> It might help some if the selector inside a message box were
visually
> distinct from the rest of the message.
+1
I don't see how this would prevent the mentioned confusion.
It wouldn't prevent it. But it would still help.
For an example: IDE syntax highlighting can't prevent confusion when
learning C or Java or anything else. But it can cut down on mistakes
and make things easier/quicker to read. This would be the same. Aside
from the [list] objects, the selector is treated special in message
passing (in fact it usually determines what happens next), so giving a
visual clue would be quite helpful.
Additionally, because of implicit float messages the first thing one
sees in a message box is not necessarily the selector. One of the
sources of confusion is looking at [1 2 3( and deducing that the first
atom is "$1", the second atom is "$2", and so on. That's fine but it
doesn't work for the general case. And that's when someone has to
understand how selectors work. They aren't very complex, and I try to
be consistent when describing the anatomy of a message-- but in a visual
programming environment it's really great to connect the dots by saying
"the word in the little rounded box there". Furthermore, it serves as a
reminder of what the user just learned.
It might seem superfluous or even distracting. But look back at the
OP's message: "one two three". That's a message which implicitly
assumes all atoms of the message are created and treated equally. Again
it doesn't prevent confusion, but having the word "one" visually
distinguished from "two three" is one step closer to understanding
what's going on.
In essence, it helps to create a low latency learning environment by
removing unnecessary round trips through the Pd-list.
And how would you like to do this? Italics, size, colors, different font?
I like the little "token" widgets that are used in email apps and other
places. That's hard to do in a tk canvas, easier in tkpath (Pd-l2ork).
Of course it's complicated by nonlocal message-passing when using
semicolons, so it may prove to be rather troublesome to implement. But I
still like the idea and will look into what it would take to do it.
-Jonathan
It seems that [list] classes (e.g. [list split]) turn words into
symbols and multiple words into a list automatically, just as numbers
are turned into floats and multiple numbers into a list everywhere in
Pd. The confusion is not that people cannot remember the words float,
list, bang, symbol to be reserved, but that they are used to the
convenience of how Pd handles floats and list of floats. You would
almost forget that "dog" is not a symbol and that "dog cat bear" is
not a list, particularly because [list split] doesn't complain and
just returns a real list.
--Funs
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