[PD-dev] strings

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sun, 17 Dec 2006, Martin Peach wrote:

>> You make them work as strings when they can, and
>> You make them work as symbols when they must.
> There would be two objects, [stringtosymbol] and [symboltostring] that you 
> could put between string and symbol objects. Of course some strings would get 
> impossibly mangled this way but that's because of the way symbols work.

I have no clue what you're talking about: how mangled would they be? i 
don't plan any mangling to happen, except for the presence of \0 
characters.

> Yes, there's no reason not to have 0-length strings. And no reason to trash 
> them when they are unused either, since they don't take up more space than 
> any other object.

They take the space it takes to tell their size and the pointer to the 
buffer. That's significant, and nearly as much as in the case of a 
t_symbol, supposing that those t_strings can live independently of the 
objects that produce them.

> I'm suggesting that a [string] be like any other object and be 
> deallocated when the patcher is closed.

Ok, that's certainly the string feature that I want. It's too much trouble 
for the benefit.

Man, that's not n atom type.

> Symbols are difficult to work with because their content gets interpreted,

You say that in answer to my questions on allocation? (That's not an 
allocation issue and not even any kind of memory layout issue.)

> for example if I write a comment "MP 20061214" it gets converted into "MP 
> 2.00612e+007"

the contents of a comment box is not a symbol. It's a list of atoms. 
However, Pd has the same problem you describe when trying to save some 
symbols. e.g. say you have a symbol with a space in it and you pass it to 
a messagebox "set $1" which passes it to an empty messagebox, and then you 
save the patch: then you have that problem with symbols. But the contents 
of the comment box has that problem while never storing its contents as a 
symbol.

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