[Pd] Infernal symbols

[Chuckk Hubbard]

On 8/6/06, Frank Barknecht <fbar at footils.org> wrote:
> Hallo,
> Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 6 Aug 2006, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> >
> > >meta-message:
> > >
> > > * (almost) everything else. ("almost" because there also are things
> > >   like pointers or GemLists, which are even more special)
> >
> > pointers are essentially on the same level as floats and symbols.
> > Together they are the three main atom types of Pd and have corresponding
> > reserved selectors and all assumed to have one argument.
>
> Yes, that's true, I didn't want to make it more complicated than
> needed for a simple explanation. It's important to note that one can
> build a list-message not only with numbers and words (or floats and
> symbols) as I wrote simplifyingly (is that a word?) but additionally
> also with pointers as list elements:
>
> [pack float pointer]
>
> would create such a list. This can be handy sometimes.

Once I understood what pointers are for, I never had any troubles with
them.  They don't impose themselves unless explicitly called for, and
it's hard to ever mix them up with anything else.  And, more to the
point, if you pass a pointer message through a [pointer] object, as
near as I can tell, it comes out exactly the same as it went in; not
so with [symbol].  A pointer's usage is never determined by what
object it comes from.