[PD] request for objections: any2string -> unsigned char

[Bryan Jurish]

moin all,

On 2009-01-18 19:41:06, Roman Haefeli <reduzierer at yahoo.de> appears to
have written:
> On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 13:46 +0100, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
>> Martin Peach wrote:
>> i always thought that bryan's "pdstrings" was intended for purposes of
>> linguistic processing (unlike a lot of your objects that are indeed
>> targeted at transmission).
> without having thought of what pdstring could be targeted to, i was
> always looking for something targeted for transmission, i.e. to be
> used together with [comport] or [tcp[server|client|send|receive]]. if
> pdstring is not recommended, what is recommended then?

well, without wanting to be trite, I have to say that think that "data
transmission" and "linguistic processing" are pretty much synonymous.
In fact, the original reason for writing [pdstring] was to enable me to
transmit (pseudo-)natural-language data represented as lists of pd atoms
as a stream of byte values over OSC (using zexy's [drip]), so I guess
the "target use" is "transmitting (processed) character data" ;-)

That said, I think the [pdstring] representation is just a way of
fudging a string datatype into pd -- use it for whatever seems useful to
you.  The "string" part may (as Mathieu suggested) change to unicode in
the future, but I've added aliases [any2bytes] and [bytes2any] for now.

marmosets,
	Bryan

-- 
Bryan Jurish                           "There is *always* one more bug."
jurish at ling.uni-potsdam.de      -Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology