On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 7:32 AM, IOhannes m zmölnig zmoelnig@iem.at wrote:
On 04/10/12 10:33, katja wrote:
I mean to say that switching to any format other than decimal ASCII would make it impossible for Pd to interpret patch files using the current format.
why?
I think that using any non-decimal ascii format would be bad for backwards compatibility. You'd need to have a function that would be able to distinguish the decimal numbers from old patches from the newer format. For example, 9000 is both a decimal and hexadecimal number--so then, you'd need identifiers to know which method to use.
It's not a very clear-cut tradeoff, to adopt anything other than longer decimal ascii numbers. Things could get very complicated trying to keep multiple formats alive--or they could be simple and just use a lot more characters.