[PD] what is a list? (symbols vs. floats)

[Krzysztof Czaja]

hi Hans-Christoph,

what drives you nuts is the message-passing system -- pure data
structured types are quite another story.  In the message-passing
system, the only typed entities are "atoms".  Every message is
being handled as

<selector> <atom>*

The <selector> is a symbol, which purpose is to determine a method
-- the actual handler, as defined by a class for that kind of
a message (so, in short, you cannot bind methods to particular
floats in Pd).

When the message-passing system (actually, the binbuf_eval()
routine in this case), constructs a message from a sequence of
atoms, it just tries to be nice and smart, that is all.  First
atom being a symbol, becomes the selector.  If it is a float, and
there are no more atoms, the message is to be handled by a "float"
method, if defined, otherwise the handler is the "list" method.

I wonder, perhaps you will be less confused, if you think about
the Max-in-Pd part in terms of a communication protocol of sorts?

Krzysztof

Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> There are a number of datatype inconsistencies that drive me nuts in Pd 
> and I am wondering what the rhyme or reason is, or whether they are just 
...
> Ok, I can see that anything that starts with a float is automatically 
> deemed a list, while anything that starts with a symbol is automatically 
> deemed not a list unless cast as such.  This is confusing and I don't 
> see the benefit.