> What about people parsing Pd files in Pd? If they're searching for symbol "foo", are they going to have to deal with the edge case of symbol "foo\v"?

Ivica,

Just to give an example-- suppose someone is using a patch to store configuration data for their project. They type the config data as comments in the

patch, much like [pd META]. Then they parse their patch from within Pd, using [textfile], or [text] or whatever.

Now, if they decide to insert some newlines into the comments to make their config prettier, as far as I understand this ends up appending an invisible

'\v' character to the last atom of each line. So the next time they read their config they will get corrupted data that's hard to debug because the

character doing the corruption is non-printable.

That's the only direct downside I can see. But as a design pattern it's problematic-- there are other places in Pd where a dev tried to use an

"obscure" character as a placeholder for something else. That approach usually ends up creating more bugs.

-Jonathan