for me that's a bug in the _language_ pd ... since it can take hours to figure that out ...
I agree that this behavior is problematic because its counter-intuitive plus I don't see much or any benefit to having an empty list interpreted as a bang. Does anyone have any killer examples to convince us?
interpreting empty lists as bangs, is at least a decent way to solve this, although i would try to figure out, where empty lists appear (e.g. route) and try to replace them with bangs... maybe there is a way to forbid that objects can send empty lists at all...
cheers ... tim