[PD] a story for Lists

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at eds.org
Wed Apr 8 04:51:32 CEST 2009


On Apr 7, 2009, at 6:08 AM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

> Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>> Oops, there was supposed to be a second part to that, which is a  
>> question: So why couldn't meta-messages all be lists, and whatever  
>> part of Pd it is that checks for meta-messages just checks the  
>> first item of the incoming list for "set", "add2", etc.?
>
> basically because it is like it is.
> i guess that if someone (not completely naive; and with an eye on  
> language-design and not just tool-design) would go and re-invent the  
> wheel, they would make lists just lists. without any special  
> "selector" (just the first element of the list).
>
> as things stand, you have to either accept things how they are or  
> look for an alternative.
> changing the way list works will be destructive to all but the most  
> trivial patches out there.


I think it would be possible to make a library that treated every  
message with more than one element as a list.  It would be a library  
of pack, unpack, prepend, append, route, etc.   But then you could use  
that library to have easier list handling, but still have backwards  
compatibilty.  Some day... maybe someone can beat me to it!

.hc

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