Hallo, Martin Peach hat gesagt: // Martin Peach wrote:
OK I see, so then wouldn't it be a good idea to merge those two types of list into one? Just treat all messages as lists. Then there is no restriction on the first element. Then an external could have a single list method which would be called for any possible input, instead of the plethora of methods for each possible input symbol and type the way it is now; the external would parse its input and call all those functions itself instead of registering them all with pd and having pd call them. Probably the time taken would be no different and the symbol table would be much smaller.
Let me quote Matju on this (from a post he did on pd-dev replying to Hans, when the term "undefined set" was still debated and finally abandoned and which I called "meta-messages".)
Messages have selectors. Selectors are used to select methods.
Suppose that the Pd of your dreams comes to existence, and that may mean without any so-called "undefined sets". Every message would be a "list". Then how would you send a message like "set $1" or "color $1 $2" to an object? somehow the list method (which is then the only method in each class) would have to deal with all messages. Then a neat idea to break down the code in more manageable bits would be to select one of several C functions depending on the first element of the received list. This first argument could be called a "selector". But now, what about a list-processing object that really needs to be able to receive a list in the same inlet as you would use to do "set" and "color" and such? To disambiguate this, let's prefix the lists intended for list-processing with a special selector that we might call "list".
Thus messages would be called lists and former lists would be called something else like "really lists" but there might be better names. And then again there would be things that are lists but not "really lists" and there appear again the "undefined sets" that aren't undefined nor sets.
Or in the words of Miller:
It's not clear whether this was a good design choice, but it's entrenched.
I learned the word "entrenched" from that.
Ciao
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__