Hi Frank,
as I've mentioned before, this obscure and arcane business of many types of messages is probably the most incomprehensible bit for new users coming to Pd. What I'd like to see in this chapter is not just another taxonomy of the different kind of messages Pd has. Rather, I'd like to see clear tutorials with real world examples of why you would use different messages for different purposes instead of presenting a bunch of abstract information right away.
I think the priority for the FLOSS Manual should be to show *why* things are used, rather than to be exhaustive about all the different things that *could* be used. So if obscure details are skipped in the beginning in favor of clarity, I would prefer that. Other, later examples can show the more exotic types and uses of "meta messages" "custom messages" etc, or the distinctions between them when it becomes important.
It's a different approach than most people currently in Pd seem to be used to writing. Probably this has to do with how they learned it...by being given lists of things to memorize! ;-)
best! D.
Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, Jo?o Pais hat gesagt: // Jo?o Pais wrote:
--Looks very good!
thanks,
One remark though: In messages08.pd messages without a symbol/list/float selector ("meta-messages") are called "undefined strings" which I think is misleading and even wrong: Pd vanilla doesn't have proper strings, and these messages are defined like anything else, they even are very common everywhere in Pd ("reset", "set", "read", "open" etc. come to mind).
In messages09.pd ff. a lot of these meta-messages are used, so it's even more misleading to call them undefined strings before.
In the context of this explanation I would just call them "other messages" or meta-messages, which is the term used by Miller, or "custom messages".
Ciao