[PD-dev] [ANN] mostly for devs and tcl'ers: tclpd

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

I am not saying that I like the current symbol system.  I am saying  
that I don't think it is appropriate to change the behavior in only  
certain places.  That just leads to more confusion and bugs.

For now, I think it would be a good idea to have the Tcl API match Pd  
as close as possible.  Pointer support would be interesting but I  
don't think you need to do it that way.

It is like it is now, so we can test it as it is.

.hc

On Oct 24, 2007, at 6:16 AM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Oct 2007, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>> - About the symbol/float stuff, I think Pd is intended to always  
>> reduce atoms to their elemental type based on their content.  
>> Therefore, {symbol 123} shouldn't really exist.
>
> If I make symbol 123456789 it's because it's intended to stay  
> 123456789. I don't want tclpd to bastardise it by assuming that i'm  
> ok with an approximation of the number that it could be  
> representing if my intent was really to represent a quantity  
> instead of just having a string of characters.
>
> Federico and I came to the conclusion that we came to because  
> pretty much anything else sucked in some way. We don't care that Pd  
> seems perfectly ok with blowing up the saving of symbols that look  
> like numbers, and we don't care that you don't want support for  
> pointers.
>
> I don't think that you and I and all of us have to stick with mere  
> original intents.
>
> The main alternative I would have had to that, is to represent Pd  
> symbols in Tcl as the Pd parser would accept them. This means that  
> a float would be backslashed. But I had ruled that out because then  
> there would be no way to represent a pointer, unless some extra  
> syntax is designed, plus other reasons.
>
>> Therefore, I think it would be better to just use normal Tcl  
>> lists, at least for now.
>
> If you do it "at least for now", you're stuck with it forever or so.
>
>> Plus, I think Pd's type handling is partially modeled after Tcl's.
>
> I don't know how you can argue that, but there's a large enough  
> chunk of difference, that you could ignore the similarities. If  
> Pd's type system was roughly like Tcl's, then users would never  
> have to think about types in [pack], [unpack], [t], and such, for  
> example.
>
>  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
> | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada



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