Thanks a lot Frank,
now I see it all quite clearly.
I always thought that the two following conjectures were true:
conjecture 1 - any given message output by any PD object can always be reproduced by writing it down literally in a message box
conjecture 2 - a PD message is simply a human-readable string that you can always "see" by for example [print]ing it, or prepending a "set" and viewing it in a message box, and two messages that "appear" identical are identical.
Now I see both conjectures are wrong (kinda disappointed since I loved them) but once I assume that, and thank to your explanation, everything is clear and coherent.
A desired message can always be generated using a makefilename or something, and the difference between different cases can be detected - though all this in a less immediate way than I thought.
Now that I think about it, a proper escaping mechanism for writing literals and spelling messages could allow both conjectures to become true without touching the message mechanism: an escape character such as § or whatever may force a number to be interpreted as a numeric symbol (or numeric symbol-selector). For example: [§123( [list 1 3 §123 foo bar( [symbol §123(
Also, the [print] object may print out numeric symbols with the escape character Also, when dynamically setting (or updating) the content of a message box, the escape character may show up.
Wouldn't it be desirable? What would the drawbacks be?
Thanks again m.
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