[PD] Understanding Selectors, Atoms, Lists ...

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> Yes, I agree, lets file a bug report against [pack] ... oh, but what about
> backwards compatibility. :(

that feature could be re-enabled by starting pd with the "-sloppy" 
option...

> I guess, the misleading behaviour comes from the fact, that the first
> inlet often is an "anything" inlet, which accepts anything:
> meta-messages, symbols, floats, lists, that sometimes are distributed
> over other inlets etc.

just because it can accept anything doesn't mean it does. In practice, a 
lot of left inlets only accept a handful of selectors. if 
class_addanything is used to trap all remaining messages (and for example 
use it as a shortcut for symbol) then it's a deliberate act, and the fact 
that some objects accept this encourage people to think that it's normal 
that you don't have to write "symbol" in front of symbols in messageboxes.

> [list] in pd-0.39 works great for adding proper selectors, btw. because
> by design it adds a list-selector and the message will be auto-converted
> by Pd to a proper symbol-message later, if the incoming message just
> contained one non-float element.

well that means that [list] can't support any methods other than 
"anything", at the risk of causing exceptions, and that's exactly what 
filing a bug report against [pack] would be about... or am I missing 
anything?

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