[PD] lost messages (toxy vs. pd ???)

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jul 28, 2004, at 10:00 AM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

>
> On Wed, 28 Jul 2004, Tim Blechmann wrote:
>
>> interpreting empty lists as bangs, is at least a decent way to solve
>> this, although i would try to figure out, where empty lists appear  
>> (e.g.
>> route) and try to replace them with bangs...
>> maybe there is a way to forbid that objects can send empty lists at
>> all...
>
> There are many algorithms that rely on empty lists, for example, to
> indicate the end of the computation, when removing elements one after  
> the
> other, or as a starting case, when adding elements.

Ok, so are there any other algorithms that could do this without using  
empty lists?  I think that the list behavior is very confusing to  
learn, and so far, I haven't seen any real benefit besides syntactic  
sugar.  Do you have any examples?  I am writing a all_about_lists...  
help file so it would be helpful.


> Therefore I cannot approve anything like getting rid of empty lists. I
> already have trouble digesting that Pd doesn't want to make a  
> difference
> between a one-float list and a plain float.

This is a perfect example of the confusing behavior of lists.  Here's a  
little example: try to summarize the complete behavior of Pd lists in  
one sentence.  Its quite difficult since there are a number of caveats.

.hc
________________________________________________________________________ 
____

                     There is no way to peace, peace is the way.
										-A.J. Muste
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 1568 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/attachments/20040728/6e2a58a7/attachment.bin>