----- Original Message -----

From: Pierre-Olivier Boulant po.boulant@free.fr To: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com; PD-List pd-list@iem.at Cc: Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 7:52 PM Subject: Re: [PD] more strings to translate

Hi,

I translated that last bunch of keywords for the search plug-in. Some are not that easy to understand out of context. To me, if the keywords are to be usable/understandable to new comers I suggest they could also have a more explicit indication to help. I mean "anything_op" is not really straight forward. It could say something like "operates on any kind of data" to make things a bit clearer. Short keywords in the [pd META] are ok, it's just so that the interface is accessible to anyone.

That's a special one.  Basically this is any object that has an "anything" method, and which can output a message with any selector that matched the "anything" method in the first place.

What it boils down to is this: will the object in question send output (possibly generated from multiple inputs) which ends up generating a badly formed Pd message?

Example: message box

Demo:

[set float boat, bang( | [(

Verdict: Clicking the first message box will successfully fill the second message box with the text "float boat", but the "bang" will output an error because "float boat" isn't a well formed Pd message.  Therefore, message box is an anything_op

Quite simply, an anything_op is a poorly designed object.  You'll see many of the results of the query for that keyword are objects that are now made obsolete by [list split], [list append], etc.  (I should probably add a clause to the anything_op definition to explain that most of those objects are either obsolete or convenience objects for people coming from Max.)

The [textfile] object is another one-- it isn't obsolete but it suffers from the same problem. If I remember correctly it can't even parse Pd files with impunity because you might end up with a line that starts with the word float (as in a data structure definition) followed by a symbol atom.

That's all to say that "anything_op" should not be applied to objects simply because they happen to have an anything method.  Rather it's to delineate old, mostly obsolete objects, originally for my own curiosity but going forward to group objects with similar functionality and limitations.

-Jonathan

Cheers pob