> Hello Jonathan,
> Thanks for your reply.
> I'm not quite sure what you mean.
> What pd-vanilla object do you use to implement "Variable number of keys of arbitrarily typed values"
[text], [coll], etc.
> or "set number of keys with set value types"?
data structures
The benefit of the latter is that you know the number of "slots" ahead of time so you can populate
the data without needing to allocate memory.
> I should add that I'm interested ultimately in a data structure that I can populate from text files, read by PD.
In that case I don't think the benefit I mentioned wrt data structures matters because
the I/O speed will be your limiting factor.
My suggestion would be to start with the more expressive vanilla object-- [text]-- and see
if it fulfills your needs. Keep in mind though that it is at core not a key/value store but instead
a 2-dimensional array of atoms. E.g., you can decide that the first item in each line is your
key, but the text class interface does nothing to prevent you from adding more lines that
duplicate that same key.
-Jonathan
> -ali