Bugs item #2026128, was opened at 2008-07-23 23:02 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by fbar You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=478070&aid=2026128...

Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread, including the initial issue submission, for this request, not just the latest update. Category: puredata Group: None Status: Open Resolution: None Priority: 5 Private: No Submitted By: Hans-Christoph Steiner (eighthave) Assigned to: Miller Puckette (millerpuckette) Summary: [list trim] outputs mystery type after conversion

Initial Comment: If you start with a symbolic atom in a symbol message, then run it thru a [list trim], you end up with a mystery type that is just a numeric atom, but does not work as a float message.

see attached patch for an example

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Comment By: Frank Barknecht (fbar)

Date: 2008-07-24 08:09

Message: Logged In: YES user_id=569446 Originator: NO

Then you should report that "inconsistency" and not something else. The behaviour you dislike has nothing to do with [list trim] nor with conversions nor mysteries.

The only problem here is, that certain symbols cannot directly be represented in Pd's patch format. This includes symbols with a pure numeric content - which Pd reads as numbers in a patch file - but also many other symbols like those for whitespace characters (SPACE, TAB,...), the backslash etc. To use these, you have to create them with something like [makefilename], but after that, they get treated correctly by all builtin objects, especially [select] or [list].

See attached example. File Added: numeric-symbol.pd

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Comment By: Hans-Christoph Steiner (eighthave) Date: 2008-07-24 06:40

Message: Logged In: YES user_id=27104 Originator: YES

This is a question of how should Pd behave, now how it currently does. If there is supposed to be such a thing as "a symbolic atom that is a number, but without a symbol selector", then it should be fully supported and documented. But this is the current definition of a symbolic atom (Pd manual 2.1.2):

"Anything that is not a valid number is considered a symbol."

By taking the converse of the above rule, "1234" looks like a valid number so it should be a float. That inconsistency is the bug that I am trying to highlight.

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Comment By: Frank Barknecht (fbar) Date: 2008-07-24 01:38

Message: Logged In: YES user_id=569446 Originator: NO

I hope even with all my spelling mistakes you can understand my previous post ... Is it possible to edit posts?

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Comment By: Frank Barknecht (fbar) Date: 2008-07-24 01:36

Message: Logged In: YES user_id=569446 Originator: NO

Yeah, these "mystery types" can be confusing, but in reality they are just ordinary symbols with a pure numeric data part. Note that these numeric symbols are not numbers or floats!

[list trim] removes the selector, so after that you have a "1234" string without selector (or with "symbol 1234" as selector, but minus the "symbol" part. You can covert this back to a Pd-symbol with a [symbol] or [list] object. However as you cannot represent numberic symbols in a saved Pd patch, you cannot use [select 1234] or [route 1234] to select or route them.

However you can use [select -DUMMY-] and prime that with a numeric symbol created with [makefilename %d] construct to its left inlet to select numeric symbols. The same "trick" is used to select backslashes or other for example split a symbol at any other "unusual" symbol using [list2symbol]. Try 92---[makefilename %c] to split at backslashes, for example.

Anyway, there's nothing mysterious about numeric symbols, they are just unusual in Pd. I think, we had similar confusions before in the bug tracker, but I didn't check.

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You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=478070&aid=2026128...