On 2020-10-01 10:10, Matt Davey wrote:
if you bang the 7 17 message, and then bang the message box that gets set, pd outputs to console:
float: no method for '717'
But if you then save the patch, reload, and bang that same message box, it outputs correctly.
Is that a bug? Surely if behaviour is different between a live patch and a saved patch, that constitutes buggy behaviour?
no. not really.
- Pd has a strong distinction between numbers and symbols.
- however, Pd displays symbols and numbers the same. (there's no
*visual* clue that a text is a number or a symbol apart from it's content). this is why you think that your "7"+"17" is a number in the first place.
- when Pd parses a string into an atombuffer (this is what happens when
you load a patch), it will try to determine whether a given string is a number of not. if it looks like a number, it will become a number. if it doesn't, it will become a symbol. this is why 717 becomes a number after loading.
so what you are seeing is a side-effect of how Pd works - which in turn makes Pd able to get anything accomplished in a way that makes it usable as a live system for playing on stage. there are languages that don't make a distinction between numbers and strings (like PHP). there's probably a reason why people don't use PHP for realtime signal processing; and the automatic type coercion (treating strings as numbers and vice versa, depending on the context), is a source of much headache and bugs.
of course, one could tweak the fileformat a little bit, so that it will indicate that "717" is really a symbol, and when you load the patch, it will still look like a number, but still be a symbol (so you get the "no method for '717'" again).
the problem with this is, that it will probably break a lot of patches.
matt's
[set $1$2, bang(construct is really only useful if you wantto send the data to a messagebox (but why would you want to do that?)
I often use [set $1, bang ( for things like setting a message box with the output of openpanel, and then also triggering the message. Had no idea that it didn't work for floats.
it works fine. why would it not?
what you are doing with [set $1, bang( is:
- store the current value for later use
- show the current value
- use the current value right now
i'm also using this quite often. however, my "why would you want to do that" was meant to say: this doesn't do anything useful in the context of the question.
also note that "$1" and "$1$2" are two very different things.
fgmadrs IOhannes