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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Tuesday, Mar 16, 2004, at 07:48 America/New_York, Krzysztof Czaja 
wrote:

> hi Hans-Christoph,
>
> Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> ...
>> whether it starts with a float or a symbol.   It makes general 
>> message handling a lot more difficult because you often have to do 
>> things differently for all these different conditions, rather than 
>> having a more unified approach.  Maybe there is something I am 
>> missing,
>
> but how would you unify these -- by using float selectors, or not
> using selectors at all?
>

I am not sure of how to what needs to be done, so I wanted to start a 
discussion as to what the overarching structure of message handling is, 
in situations like these, so that we could come up with some solutions 
to making things more intuitive.  Or at the very least, we could write 
some in-depth docs explaining it.

I guess the crux of the matter is that a group of floats is assumed to 
be a list while a group of symbols is not.  I am wondering why floats 
would be treated differently than symbols when they are all messages.  
This also has implications on mixed-type messages, which I use a lot.  
One way to work around this would be to have [route] check for 
mixed-media messages and treat them all the same.  But this could get 
computationally expensive if the messages where large.

.hc