In your quote of Miller's help patch you left off half the sentence.  Here's the
full quote:

"Route checks the first element of a message against each of
its arguments, which may be numbers or symbols (but not a
mixture of the two.)"*

The part before the comma is wrong-- that's not how [route] works.  The reality is:
1) If the first arg is a symbol atom, then [route] is put in "selector" mode and checks
the selector against its arguments.  Subsequent args are assumed to be symbol atoms
(and if you try to use a float as a subsequent arg it will be treated as an empty symbol).
2) If the first arg is a float, then [route] is put in "list" mode and checks the first element
of an incoming list against its arguments.  Subsequent args are assumed to be floats
(and if you try to use a symbol it will be treated as the value "0").

So what you quoted is the answer, as long as the questioner magically realizes to
ignore everything before the comma.

* The parenthesis should be inside the period.

-Jonathan

--- On Sun, 2/27/11, Pedro Lopes <pedro.lopes@ist.utl.pt> wrote:

From: Pedro Lopes <pedro.lopes@ist.utl.pt>
Subject: Re: [PD] unexpected behaviour in [route]
To: "Jack" <jack@rybn.org>
Cc: pd-list@iem.at, "rene beekman" <r@raakvlak.net>
Date: Sunday, February 27, 2011, 11:49 PM

The first paragraph of route-help states:

"which maybe numbers or symbols (but not a mixture of the two unless the datatypes are defined explicitly)"

Its the answer.
See the help patch.

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 10:40 PM, Jack <jack@rybn.org> wrote:
This is not a bug.
Just do something like this to avoid any problem :

[route number number number ...]/[route word word word ...]
++

Jack



Le dimanche 27 février 2011 à 22:46 +0200, rene beekman a écrit :
> I'm preparing some patches for courses that I teach and I noticed
> behaviour in [route] that I found unexpected or at least inconsistent.
>
>
> Attached is a patch that demonstrates the problem.
>
>
> In short: when mixing types of arguments for [route], the object will
> fail to properly route a float if the float is preceded by a symbol
> argument.
> For example:
> [route 12 nobug] will route 12 properly
> [route bug 12] will send any incoming 12 to its last ('undefined')
> output
>
>
> This is with Pd Extended 0.42.5 on Mac OS 10.6.6
>
>
> Is this a bug or am I overlooking something?
>
>
> Rene
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pd-list@iem.at mailing list
> UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list


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--
Pedro Lopes (MSc)
contact: pedro.lopes@ist.utl.pt
website: http://web.ist.utl.pt/Pedro.Lopes / http://pedrolopesresearch.wordpress.com/ | http://twitter.com/plopesresearch

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