[PD-dev] post/verbose code

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Mar 16, 2010, at 5:20 AM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

> On 2010-01-22 22:04, Miller Puckette wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As I understand it... post() puts out an entire line, and  
>> startpost(),
>> any number of "poststring", etc, and then an endpost() also puts out
>> one line.  The only ugly thing is that some old code uses  
>> "poststring"
>> (etc) to APPEND text to a post().
>>
>> I think it would be compatible with existing code to make "post"  
>> supply
>> a newline at the end of teh message, to have "startpost()" be a  
>> post()
>> but without the newline, and endpost() only put out the newline.  The
>> only trick would be (for compatibility) that if a post() is followed
>> by one or more poststring() calls, one should insert the poststring()
>> text before the newline that was written by post(), e.g.:
>>
>> post("foo")
>>
>> --> foo\n
>>
>> poststring("bar")
>>
>> ---> foo bar\n
>
> hmm, as a matter of fact, i just tried this, and it doesn't seem to be
> true anyhow:
>
> <code>
>  endpost();
>  post("foo");
>  poststring("bar");
>  endpost();
>  post("bla");
> </code>
>
> results in
> <output>
> foo
> bar
> bla
> </output>
> that is "foo\n bar\nbla"
>
> i also did a not-so-quick grep over all the externals in the puredata
> svn, and found that poststring() is only used 3 times in total,  
> twice in
> cyclone (where it is only used in startpost()->poststring()->endpost()
> constructs), and once in zexy (where i have put plenty of manual  
> "\n" in
> the strings to be printed).
>
> i don't hink that compatibility in printout is _very_ important, and
> since it doesn't seem to work anyhow as expected, i guess it is a good
> chance to remove cruft.


Makes sense to me.  Sounds like it should be fixed to be right, rather  
than maintaining backwards compatibility.

.hc


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