[PD] a story for Lists

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at eds.org
Wed Apr 8 17:34:53 CEST 2009


On Apr 8, 2009, at 6:51 AM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

> Frank Barknecht wrote:
>> Hallo,
>> IOhannes m zmoelnig hat gesagt: // IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
>>> 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).
>> But if you drop the current selectors and use the first element of  
>> any
>> list as selector, you just have reinvented selectors, haven't you? ;)
>
> no.
> or yes, but selectors need not be symbols, and there would be no  
> special selectors, that implictely define the tail of the list.
>
> somehow functional languages like lisp manage to do well with lists  
> and dealing the head of a list (selector) in various special ways  
> without making the head be different from the elements of the tail.


On Apr 8, 2009, at 2:32 AM, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Like [list append], [list prepend], [list split], [list  
> length], ...? :)

This is kind of the opposite of what we mean, I think.  It forces the  
"list" on everything.  It is a library built around that one concept  
then, which is good.  But I think, like IOhannes says above, that it  
should be possible to ditch the "float" and "symbol" selectors, since  
Pd is already setting the type of each atom, then call any message  
with more than one atom a "list" and also drop the "list" selector.

Then something like [route symbol float list] would just sort data,  
without stripping off any atoms from the message, but [route foo bar]  
would still look for the first atom, and if it finds it, strip it off  
and route it.

.hc

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