Hallo,
(I cc. to the list as well, I hope you don't mind.)
Sciss hat gesagt: // Sciss wrote:
frank, thanks for the links to the text from you and hc ; i think i
quite understand the thing know (although i still find it not very
convincing to have a "symbolic atom" along with a "symbol" ;-)so i guess you can often omit the selector for the left inlet because
that's a special "accepts all" inlet, right?
No, that's not dependent of the inlet number although as a convention most objects accept meta-messages at their first inlet. However you cannot just omit the selector. It really depends on the object that gets this message. For example "set" and "symbol set" are two very different messages, which you can see by creating a graphical symbol-object with Ctrl-4, and connecting a [set( and a [symbol set( message to it. Pressing the "set" message will not change, what you typed into the symbol, however "symbol set" will input "set" into the symbol-atom.
This gets even clearer if you use a message object instead of the symbol-atom like in:
[symbol set( | | [set( |/ [hallo $1( | [print]
If you press the "symbol set" message, Pd will print "hallo set" because $1 will get expanded.
However if you press the "set" message, Pd will print nothing, instead the contents of the "hallo $1" message will be deleted and the message will be set to be empty. ("set something" would set it to "something").
So the difference between messages with selectors and messages without a selector can be HUGE. The only place, where the selector can be omited is with messages that start with a floating point number. They will automatically become a float or a list messages depending on how many elements the messages has. Also empty messages are normally considered to be a "bang" message.
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__