moin joerg,
On 13 October 2004 at 14:08:55, joerg piringer appears to have written:
hi all, i am trying to develop a string external that does not use symbols for string storage because of known problems with symbols.
sounds excellent -- i have been chewing on string represntations for pd for a while; my only real current implementation is the 'pd-string' package (http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~moocow/projects), which has 2 objects: [any2string] and [string2any] -- "strings" are passed around as lists of floats (in the range 0..255) -- it's pretty space-inefficient, but it does appear to work.
what i am now doing is using string handles (int) and store the strings internally in my external. that works quite well. the only problem is that i had to introduce usage counters to free my string memory when it is no longer needed.
[snip]
... that sounds pretty complex to me. perhaps we might work together to crunch more string data into a "list", maybe using a special selector ('string'? 'ascii'?) for it? that way, we could avoid at least some hairiness with reference-counting: it looks like at least 3 bytes can be encoded losslessly in one float (for later extraction with bitwise ops), which is still wasting 1/4 of the allocated space, but I think I can live with that... you?
marmosets, Bryan