[PD] String editing

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Hallo,
> Thomas Sivertsen hat gesagt: // Thomas Sivertsen wrote:
> 
>>Ah, yes. I get this. The weird thing is happening in [prepend] then, 
>>because it does not handle the symbol as an identifier for the data, but 
>>as part of the data. Now, which version/incantation of [prepend], you 
>>may ask? 
> 
> 
> The prepend from Cyclone does not do this. Maybe you are using the one
> from IEMlib? Or the one in Ggee or prepend2 or ... 

the problem i see is, that it often makes sense to prepend another 
identifier to "anythings".

eg: i have a message [play myfile.wav( ("play" being an identifier) and 
want to transmit this message via [netsend] so i have to prepend a 
"send" identifier to get [send play myfile.way(.
one could argue, that "symbol" should be handled in a different way, but 
probably i would like to transmit a symbol "mobo" via netsend: if i 
would substitute the "symbol" by "send" (e.g: [send mobo() i would 
receive an identifier "mobo" on the [netreceive] side, which i cannot 
just convert with [symbol] if i also want to send things like [play 
myfile.wav( over the same [netsend]/[netreceive] connection (because it 
would strip down to a symbol "play" without the "myfile.wav")

so what to do ?
a) make pd's message-type system more consistent (will probably break 
quite everything)
b) use [a2l] (bias!!) or something similar with a standardized (as you 
suggested) [prepend]

probably it would be a good idea to make [a2l] built into pd too (maybe 
[trigger list] should be enhanced to convert anythings to lists)

and of course günter is right, when he points out the inconsistency 
between [append] and [prepend] but there is really not very much we 
could do about it (apart from renaming all the datastructure-stuff to 
something more specific)


mfg.asd.r
IOhannes