----- Original Message -----
From: Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca To: Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@at.or.at Cc: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com; "pd-list@iem.at" pd-list@iem.at; Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx; Miller Puckette msp@ucsd.edu Sent: Monday, September 5, 2011 1:11 PM Subject: Re: [PD] (breaking symbols) was Re: find a list of numbers in a text file
On Sun, 4 Sep 2011, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I think you are missing the point of what I am saying. I am not saying
with we implement a strict duck typing mimicing Ruby or Python.
I think you are missing the point of what I am saying. I am saying that you are using the wrong words for that.
So in the sense of Pd, anything that can be intepreted as a number should
be. But that's in conflict with having symbols that have things that can be intepreted as a number. So make Pd consistent, either it needs to be illegal to have symbols that can be interpreted as a number,
This could break some existing patches.
or maybe symbols that can be interpreted as a number behave like a float
when something is expecting a float.
That's what Tcl and Perl do for ints, floats and strings.
And that's what I want for Pd.
However, I wonder if this would cause more instances of people running out of memory from filling up the symbol table. Currently if you generate an error from sending a symbol atom where a float is expected, you know something screwy is going on, post to the list, and figure out the problem and generate float-atoms instead. However, if that's not an error, you increase the chance of someone needlessly generating lots of unique symbol-atoms (maybe with an accumulator, or importing them from a database as symbol-atoms instead of floats), and having problems or crashes that are less obvious.
-Jonathan
They don't call it duck-typing though, and no-one does.
duck-taping? No.
How about goose-for-duck-swapping? As in you send a duck (A_SYMBOL), and if the object expects a number then Pd swaps the duck for a goose (A_FLOAT).
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC