Roman Haefeli wrote:
[r mysynth] | [route freq amplitude]
this uses at least 5 symbols ("r", "mysynth", "route", "freq", "amplitude")
causes less pollution than something like this:
[r mysynth-freq]
[r mysynth-amplitude]
this uses at least 3 symbols ("r", "mysynth-freq", "mysynth-amplitude")
is that right?
so the answer is no.
is it also better to use short symbols or doesn't that matter?
i guess it doesn't matter.
the fixed size of the symbol-table refers to the number of entries and not to the length of the entries.
every symbol you create (this is: everything you type (via keyboard) or have already typed (your patch) or receive (via netsend) or generate (via [makefilename], or even worse [l2s]) or get into pd by some othe means (like [shell]) and which is not a number is a symbol) will occupy an entry in the symbol-table. several symbols can share one entry in the symbol table, but then this symbol has to be found in a list, and this will be costy (at least more costy than getting the entry in the symbol-table)
symbol table pollution will occur, when lots of symbols have to share one entry in the (small) symbol table.
usually this is not a real problem, if you are not working with long texts and if you are not constantly generating a lot of symbols (e.g. connect a counter to [makefilename bla-%d])
mfg.asdr. IOhannes