[PD] dealing with arguments and inlets

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Sat Feb 4 23:31:38 CET 2006


On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> I outlined these categories because each one has distinct behavior, so each
> one should have a distinct name:
> 
> bang
> float
> symbol
> pointer
> undefined element

As an atom type, undefined element does not exist. (Incidentally, 
out of 12 values of t_atomtype, only 7 are real atom types and only 3 
may travel along wires).

As an atom variable, like [float] and [symbol] and [pointer], 
if "undefined element" is meant to be any of those three, then it can 
exist, because an atom can be of only one of those types at once, while an 
atom variable may decide to hold whichever values it wants to accept.

> When you have something stored in a [symbol], [float], [any], etc. then
> its not a message, but just data.  So I don't think we should definite
> data types in terms of messages.

definite? define?

I think that there should be clear rules about mapping atoms (data) back 
to messages... and that's why I'm talking about atom messages.

> The terms that you come up with work as general categories, but they do
> not help in defining the very specific types I listed above, as data
> types, not as messages.

Since when is bang a datatype?

And is "type" as an indicator of what a piece of data is, or an indicator
of what the accepted data could be?

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada




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