[PD] PdDefinitions

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Sat Sep 29 08:54:52 CEST 2007


some help for writing your http://puredata.org/dev/PdDefinitions ... those 
are surely not the best wordings, but it adds detail.

comma (atom type): a comma character that is not backslashed, and thus is 
effective as a message separator in a messagebox.

semicolon (atom type): a semicolon character that is not backslashed, and 
thus is effective as a message separator in any context. if there was any 
implicit context (as in a messagebox), semicolon forgets it, and thus you 
get to write an explicit receiver after every semicolon.

dollar (in general): a nonbackslashed dollar sign followed by one or more 
digits. in an evaluation, this can be worth a float, symbol or pointer, 
whatever the corresponding argument in the argument list is.

dollar (atom type): a dollar that is parsed individually; is replaced by 
the corresponding atom upon evaluation.

dollsym (atom type) (missing): in pd 0.39 and earlier: a dollar 
(subtitutor) that is at the beginning of an atom, followed by symbol 
characters. Upon substitution it becomes a symbol, as the corresponding 
atom gets cast to characters and the symbols are merged to make one 
resulting symbol.

dollsym (atom type) (missing): in pd 0.40 and earlier: any alternation of 
dollar (subtitutor) and normal symbol characters. All those dollar 
substitutors get replaced by corresponding atoms cast to characters and 
all the parts are merged to make one resulting symbol.

(The backslashing stuff may be important to understand if you expect to 
modify or generate patches using [textfile] like some people do; in 
general it's good for understanding the fileformat)

Personally, I called "float" "symbol" "pointer" the stable atoms, whereas 
I call "comma" "semi" "dollar" "dollsym" the radioactive atoms, because 
they decay upon being used by messageboxes. the radioactive atoms also 
only really stay alive inside of messageboxes, so in general in pd you 
will only see functions/methods for handling stable atoms, not radioactive 
ones.

I could've put this in the wiki directly, but wanted to make sure it gets 
noticed (and also I'd like some feedback and to know what you'd change in 
this). Are there any automatic notifications of changes of wiki pages on 
puredata.info (as a configurable option, per user) ? I mean by email, just 
like for sf's bug tracker. It would be good to have this so that all 
parties involved in modifying pages really know about what's going on. It 
gives the advantages of mailing-lists to wikis.

  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada


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