[PD-dev] strings

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sat, 16 Dec 2006, Bryan Jurish wrote:
> On 2006-12-16 01:40:03, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> appears to have 
> written:
>
> i count (sizeof(int)+sizeof(float)-1)*strlen(message) wasted bytes per string 
> object, not counting the selector.

Oh yeah, sorry, the occupied space is up to 4 times as text but it's 8 
times in 32-bit mode and 16 times in 64-bit mode.

> as i think we've discussed before, using ieee floats, which should be 
> able to losslessly encode a 24 bit integer,

if you want something saveable to a file, pd can only losslessly convert 
19.93 bits to decimal.

> ... but then again, what else are ascii 0x1c-0x1f (28-31 = {fs,gs,rs,us}) 
> for?

When I was a small kid, my parents bought a CGP-115 plotter, and the code 
for changing the colour of the stylus was 29. It was in 1983.

>  it's another ugly hack, would reserve some of the ascii range,

0 is enough to do lists-of-strings because in many ASCII-based systems 
it's only ever used to mean end-of-string. It's faster than my nested-list 
hack. However, my hack looks more like what the syntax for nested lists 
could become if it were not a hack. Essentially my hack is a post-parser 
that reinterprets symbol-atoms depending on their parens-content, and 
makes it feel like pd has a LISP syntax... sometimes. (It's a 
GridFlow-only feature though).

  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada