[PD] dealing with arguments and inlets

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> That's a tricky question: What would a user of these abstractions expect
> [*_argument] to output if s/he creates an abstraction with the argument
> [myabs foo]? Should "foo" be a "foo" or a "symbol foo"? Both cases are
> quite usual, but they look the same from the argument handling.

Pd's pseudoobjects include floatatom (Ctrl+3) and symbolatom (Ctrl+4).  
Note that both of those are named with "atom" in the name. Those names are 
part of the Pd file format. The symbolatom boxes output "symbol foo" and 
not "foo", because they output something that can be auto-converted to a 
1-element list.

> For consistency I would say: If the user wants "foo" but not "symbol
> foo" s/he shouold take care of that manually with [list trim].

I agree.

> > This gets into another definition question.  What is the type in this
> > message: [word(
> It's a symbol. Oh, no, wait, it's not, "symbol word" would be a
> symbol, or rather, a symbol-symbol. [word( then would be a
> non-symbol-symbol. ;)

There are "atom messages" which is any message that has the "list"
selector and one argument, or anything that can be cast to/from it. This
includes messages with "float" "symbol" "pointer" selectors.

There are "listlike messages" which may be any message that has the "list"
selector or can be cast to/from it. This includes atom messages and the
bang message.

The rest may be called "nonlistlike messages" and everything together may 
be called "messages".

Your "non-symbol-symbol" could be called "nonlistlike messages without 
arguments" (or "messages without arguments" in order to include bang), but 
it wouldn't have that Alice-in-Wonderland sound that "non-symbol-symbol" 
has.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada