[PD] symbolatom: why does it not allow to type spaces?

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at eds.org
Wed Dec 12 06:39:20 CET 2007


It's nice to add those features, but by adding them to the pd-vanilla  
objects, that means patches written in desiredata are not compatible  
with pd-vanilla.

It seems a better solution would be to add new desiredata objects,  
then keep the iemguis compatible.

.hc

On Dec 11, 2007, at 3:32 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Dec 2007, Roman Haefeli wrote:
>
>> ah, yes i am overseeing. thank you for mentioning them. to be added:
>> labels in iemguis, when saved.
>
> I just made this movie of it:
>
>   http://artengine.ca/desiredata/gallery/iemgui_labels.mpeg
>
> DesireData will save them correctly because it uses the same code  
> for sending to the GUI as for writing to a file. It also calls the  
> same method for updating properties as is now used by the object  
> creator to load an iemgui from a file.
>
>> but these are things that already would break now and it is  
>> possible to create symbols containing spaces in pd,
>
> You could call those objects broken and adding this "feature" might  
> amount to a bug fix. I don't know who would actually use this bug  
> as a feature, but you can bet someone thought it could be a cool  
> way to split a symbol into a list. ;)
>
>> it's just not as easy as just using a symbolbox. fact is, that  
>> people do it anyway, so why trying to prevent them?
>
> Why? so that the implementation doesn't have to be changed. That  
> way no-one has to go back on whatever they have said about pd not  
> being for string processing.
>
>> i didn't know that [print] would be affected. in what way is it
>> affected? at least visually it doesn't seem to be.
>
> It adds backslashes which are not part of the symbol, because  
> that's what's accepted by any version of pd as a way to have spaces  
> within symbols. Any version of pd will load such symbols correctly,  
> stripping the backslashes (unless you have double-backslashes, of  
> course).
>
>> i encounter that ' ' is treated in a non-comprehensibly special way,
>> since other characters such as ';' or ',' are escaped by  
>> symbolatom (or
>> by pd, i don't know)
>
> Symbolatom incorrectly backslashes those characters when printing  
> them. Because it should display a symbol's content as-is, those  
> backslashes should have been stripped on the way out. It has the  
> opposite problem of [print]. [print] can print any number of atoms  
> of different types, so it has to be printed in a way that atom  
> boundaries are clear and that floats are distinguishable from  
> symbols, which is why it shares some code with the way files are  
> saved, and which is why it shares the same bug.
>
> DesireData's symbolbox works correctly for semicolons commas and  
> spaces, but has a bug with {\} characters. This can happen because  
> a symbolbox's value is not saved to file, so it has to upload it to  
> the client another way than using the save function, and the bug is  
> in that special code.
>
>  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
> | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC  
> Canada_______________________________________________
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