On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
So now that there are some people using [hid], I want to ask a question about how its working for people, specifically about the use of symbols rather than integers for the event naming scheme (i.e. "abs" vs. "2"; "rel_rx" vs. "5", etc.). It definitely takes more CPU power to use symbols, so I have two questions: Do you notice the extra CPU load from [hid]? Do you find the symbolic names useful, versus numbers?
I think that as long as integers still can be used, there is no problem with supporting symbols. I mean I've seen cases where the enforcing of symbols means having to use [sprintf] all over the place in a less-than-elegant way.
Comparing symbols is fast. [route foo bar baz] is just as fast as [route 55 242 666]. This is because gensym() ensures that if two symbols refer to the same text then they necessarily have the same pointer value. This is a standard: LISP/Smalltalk/Ruby/etc all do it the same.
Actually comparing symbols is much faster than comparing floats, if you run Pd on a 386 or on a PDA.
Comparing strings would be slower but Pd doesn't have strings.
(I haven't used [hid] yet though.)
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