On Sun, 15 Jan 2006, Frank Barknecht wrote:
It is consistent and the problem may lie elsewhere: messages are the only "objects", that do not have access to abstraction properties like abstraction arguments and $0. It is hard to give them access, because $x already is used for a different purpose in messages. One solution could be a "message object", that does both, something like a [makemessage] which could be a mix of [makefilename] on steroids and a standard [message( - and maybe could reintroduce Max's #x.
Note that there's another related notation already used in Pd. It's in [expr] and goes like:
$f1 means float in first inlet $v2 means signal in second inlet etc
and it could be reused, but then there are two things to take care of:
the type specifiers f,v, must be complemented by other specifiers s=symbol, p=pointer, and some other letter to mean atom (but not "anything" in the sense of general message).
there has to be a correspondence between the multi-inlet context of [expr] and the single-inlet context of the messagebox.
Alternately, the latter issue could be skipped completely if $1 was replaced not by $f1 or $s1, but by $a1[1] meaning first element of the message in the first inlet. This notation is also consistent with [expr~]. $a1[0] would access the selector. Here, "a" really stands for "anything" as it is normally in Pd (that is, except for the [bang}->[t a] bug)
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada