Hallo, Martin Peach hat gesagt: // Martin Peach wrote:
Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
It is entrenched so it probably won't change anytime soon. But I do
think that Pd could work without "list" and "symbol" selectors. Then
symbolic atoms would automatically be symbols and any series with more than one atom would automatically be a list. You can then have
separate inlets to handle different situations, like the first inlet
handling config messages like [set 1 3( and the second inlet handling
lists that are meant as only data.I guess separate having data and program buses like that would mean that pd had a 'leaky' Harvard architecture because there would be no way to ensure the connections were made to the correct inlet. Another approach would be to have another kind of patch cord for control messages, like the signal cords on the dsp objects.
Actually I think, that all this would just complicate issues much more than necessary. Apart from a slight linguistic confusion regarding the term list (and somehow symbol) I really don't see any grave practical problems with the way things currently are. (Except the symbol-table, but that might be an implementation issue?) The linguistic problems only are a problem when talking about the symbol or lists in a casual way. However once the rules are understood (Hans and I both tried to explain them in a concise way) they are easy to *work* with. C++ is much harder.
And personally I wouldn't want to always have to write "float 1" instead of "1" in messages as I wouldn't want to have to type "list 1 1 0" just to describe a Gem-color so I'm really glad that both selectors can be implied when numbers are involved - as numbers are the bread and butter in Pd. Just enforcing a float-selector for the sake of consistency is wrong, IMO. There must be much better reasons, before such a step should be made.
As I wrote in PdMessages, I would propose to talk about float-, symbol- and list-MESSAGES when it is important to describe them in detail. I also like the term meta-messages for "other" messages, which don't have to be a multi-element series, they can also be a single element item as "reset" (without "symbol"!).
Ciao
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__