derek holzer wrote:

Hey Oldie,

zmoelnig@iem.at wrote:

...

i am an oldie user and i never really needed to type backslashes

I guess you never tried to load a sample with whitespace in the filename into a table?

i surely did....

but: whitespaces in filenames should be avoided anyhow on windows (the only place where i stumble across whitespaces now and then) you can use those weird "blabla~1.wav"-like filenames instead. on other platforms you can use links

in symbol-space, whitespaces are handled correctly anyhow

and if i may quote myself: "in the current state of pd, escaping characters is totally unresolved." this does not mean, that i think that we don't need an escaping mechanism. indeed we should find a solution to this problem. (and there are plenty of ways for _this_ problems) enabling backslashes might work for now, but miller has explicitely disabled it and i just wanted to point out, that we might eventually have to wait until he settles on one solution.

i think, backslash as an escape character is not a good idea within the context of pd (or rather: within the context of windows(tm))

what i want to say is that using backspace is (in most of the cases) not necessary.

mfg.a.sdr IOhannes

Hi!

IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

but: whitespaces in filenames should be avoided anyhow on windows (the only place where i stumble across whitespaces now and then) you can use those weird "blabla~1.wav"-like filenames instead.

I think you refer to the good-old-DOS-days. They're over now ;-)

I think pd should support all characters the OS does. For Win >= 2000 there are some special characters like ,'+-; white space and some more. /:*?"<>| are not allowed.

But I know it's hard to implement keeping backwards compatibility to old patches and/or externals...

Piotr Majdak

i don't think that this is the main reason for not allowing some more characters. if you allow backslash as an escaping character in pd, you will get into serious problems when windows users try to load "C:\files\patch.pd", or should it read "C:\Program\ Files\patch.pd" ? what does this mean ??

Hmm, i don't understand... what's the problem about an encoding "C:\Program\ Files\patch.pd", or as used in pd "C:/Program\ Files/patch.pd" ? It's not only about filenames... as symbols can hold all possible characters, we (or me at least) would also like to enter it in the patch editor. There are numerous applications (like a text-based composition that i'm working on now) that would profit from this possibility.

and windowsers will immediately start using backslash as directory delimiter, while unixers will use it as escape.

Since i use Windows, OSX and Linux, also with mounted volumes across system-boundaries, i don't see why others shouldn't be able to handle that.

I really can't think of why \ should be dropped if it's possible to use it as _the_ common-place escape character. Maybe someone can enlighten me about Miller's possible reasons to do so. But there's always the devel branch where such things can be tried out...

best greetings, Thomas

"Hans-Christoph Steiner" wrote:

My vote is for ! (The ! is not meant to be escaped 8-] ). Maybe we could start a fund drive, and who ever successfully implements
escaping would win the prize.

.hc

hi, how would you type the ! into a messagebox? besides that, what is the prize? m.

I think allowing all characters and having an escape mechanism are two different problems? and dropping the backslash is another problem. And messages and objectboxes are yet another problem? since it is not possible until now to have a backslash in message boxes - which I still donŽt know why, there shouldŽnt be much backwards compatibility problems if all backslashes in the future are escape characters. allowing all characters is mainly a transportability problem between various character sets, but since it is already possible to use special characters in iem-guis, or when editing patches with a text-editor, that shouldŽnt be a big problem either. I think, I have seen backslashes in objectboxes. In that case there will be a backswards compatibility if the same escape mechanism is used in object boxes. So what I am talking about is only, that it would be nice to be able to output every string out of a message box. marius.

# ----- Original Message ----- From: "Piotr Majdak" piotr@majdak.com To: "IOhannes m zmoelnig" zmoelnig@iem.at Cc: pd-list@iem.at; "derek holzer" derek@x-i.net; libero.mureddu3@fastwebnet.it Sent: Monday, April 25, 2005 2:42 PM Subject: Re: [PD] newbie question about "dropped"

Hi!

IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

...

but: whitespaces in filenames should be avoided anyhow on windows (the only place where i stumble across whitespaces now and then) you can use those weird "blabla~1.wav"-like filenames instead.

I think you refer to the good-old-DOS-days. They're over now ;-)

I think pd should support all characters the OS does. For Win >= 2000 there are some special characters like ,'+-; white space and some more. /:*?"<>| are not allowed.

But I know it's hard to implement keeping backwards compatibility to old patches and/or externals...

Piotr Majdak

-- Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

Piotr Majdak Acoustics Research Institute Austrian Academy of Sciences Reichsratsstr. 17 A-1010 Vienna AUSTRIA phone: +43-1-4277-29511 fax: +43-1-4277-9296 email: piotr@majdak.com WWW: http://www.kfs.oeaw.ac.at

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Someone has got to have figured out how to use \ escaping in tcl
scripts since Tcl has been around a long time, and is generally used on
UNIX systems.

Anyone know of some examples that do this?

.hc

On Apr 25, 2005, at 10:28 AM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

...

and if i may quote myself: "in the current state of pd, escaping
characters is totally unresolved." this does not mean, that i think
that we don't need an escaping mechanism. indeed we should find a
solution to this problem. (and there are plenty of ways for _this_
problems) enabling backslashes might work for now, but miller has
explicitely disabled it and i just wanted to point out, that we might
eventually have to wait until he settles on one solution.

The biggest problem is that sys_gui() and sys_vgui() as it is being
used by all of PureData's externals does not prepare special
characters at all, and the backslash and braces are special characters
in Tcl, the language used in the user-interface part of PureData; this
means that any use of those special characters is ambiguous and
confuses Tcl, leading to all sorts of weird things such as objects
being partially drawn, or worse. This is why those three characters {} are disabled.

This should be the first topic in the upcoming 4th online PureData
developers meeting, which will be next Friday. I'll announce it on the
pd-dev mailing-list today. I have yet to prepare the list of topics we
will discuss, which is why I haven't announced it officially yet.

,-o---------o---------o---------o-. ,----.
| | The Diagram is the Program (TM) | |
,-o----------------------------o-. -o-----------------------------o-' | | Mathieu Bouchard (Montréal QC) | | |---' | http://artengine.ca/matju | | |-o------------------------------ '_______________________________________________ PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management ->
http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list

"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three
meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds,
and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits."

  - Martin Luther King, Jr.

apart from that, i am an oldie user and i never really needed to type backslashes (but i admit that it might be weird when you first come to it)

mfg.a.dsr IOhannes

hi IOhannes, others, maybe you did not need, because you knew, it was not possible... I posted just the same thing on sunday night (never post something on weekend, if you want that it be read by the "special task forces" (...) you need that kind of characters for dynamic created patches and in connection of pd with other programs.

<snip> The handling of some characters in messages is really a pain. for some externals I need to create messages, which should output $0, $1 and so on. of course there are work arounds. but easier would be to have an escape character like $ or whatever. today I needed to produce the character combination \, (backslash followed by a comma). which I needed for dynamical creation of a special object in dyn~. <snip> thanks for help. marius.

I sent another post with a mistake because I didn´t remember how worked the original patch, so I repeat here why I need the backslash. I started pure data trying to port some patches that I did with MaxMSP. One of these has an "expr" object with the following syntax:

expr 440 * pow(2,0.583333) or, in another point: expr pow(2,$f1)

where 2 is the mantissa and, separated by a backslash and a comma, there is the exponent. But, looking at the "pow" help file, I have realized that I can separate the two elements just with a comma and a space, so... Thanks for your help, even if it was completely a newbie question!!! Best regards Libero Mureddu

-- Original Message -- To: libero.mureddu3@fastwebnet.it Subject: Re: [PD] newbie question about "dropped" Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 08:58:06 +0200 (CEST) From: zmoelnig@iem.at Cc: pd-list@iem.at

Zitiere libero.mureddu3@fastwebnet.it:

...

Hello! I'm a new user of pure-data. I'm using the last Hans-Christoph Steiner version Pd-0.38-2hcs0 on a ibook g3 800, and I cannot put a backslash in a patch. I receive the message "dropped".

since you get such a nice message, you might eventually wonder whether this behaviour is on purpose. and indeed it is.

why would anybody want to use backslashes ? most likely, even with turning the dropping off by hacking the source code, you will not be able to use it as an escape character. in the current state of pd, escaping characters is totally unresolved.

apart from that, i am an oldie user and i never really needed to type backslashes (but i admit that it might be weird when you first come to it)

mfg.a.dsr IOhannes