Frank wrote:

Why care? [about how efficient pipe is] There's not much you can do about it, if it's too slow, except writing a better [pipe] in C/Lua/etc.

Well that's exactly why I need to know: to decide whether I need to write a "better" [pipe] in Lua or not!!

An approach carmen did in the past is to use list2symbol and symbol2list (the latter an external)

Yes that's an interesting solution! I usually try to go as far as possible in pd-vanilla without any external.... but maybe I've reached the "as far as possible". You may argue that I am reluctant to use an external while I would use pdlua, but one thing is to install an external that solves a specific problem, another thing is to install one single extension mechanism (pdlua) that allows you to develop any "externals" (especially when we're talking of externals for manipulating data, not for using hardware etc).

I think it's a pity that PD Vanilla doesn't include [symbol2list] or any objects capable of "breaking" symbols a little bit (with which one could build a symbol2list abstraction and maybe more), since it does give the possibility to join symbols.

Note that with [makefilename] and using the standard syntax of sprintf-like funcions (namely %.<n>s where <n> is a number) you can take the first n characters of a symbol: if only there were a way to take the remaining characters (or a way to know a symbol length + a way of taking the last m characters), one could build a symbol2list abstraction, or split a symbol into its characters etc.

.....well now I'm thinking the length of a symbol _can_ be calculated, in a loop which at iteration k takes the first k characters and compares the result with the whole symbol..... so the missing piece is the possibility to take the last n chars... or is it not?

Thank you very much for the help.

Ciao m.