[PD] Help Docs: element vs. item

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sun, 9 Aug 2009, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> --- On Sun, 8/9/09, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at> wrote:
>> Check the Pd Definitions wiki on http://puredata.info/dev for some discussion on this
>> stuff.  And please add anything there that you think
>> should be there.
> On the Pd Definitions wiki, they are referred to as elements, and I've
> already changed the reference patches to reflect this.

I wouldn't quite advocate using the PdDefinitions as they are now. Much of 
the way people talk about pd is ambiguous, and that includes Miller too. 
The Pd Manual itself has a fair amount of vague talk, but then, the 
PdDefinitions page handpicks quotes in it without regard to whether "the 
definition of float" is about float-values, float-atoms, 
floatatom-objects, the floatatom class, the strings recognised as floats, 
or the strings that floats are outputted as; and likewise for several 
other definitions lifted from the manual.

"atoms are either numbers or symbols" -> that's only when you look at what 
you can write in a messagebox that can end up as-is in a message. This 
ignore comma atoms, semicolon atoms, dollar atoms ($1), dollsym atoms 
($1-blah), and pointer atoms (which can't be produced by the parser).

"There are two atom boxes, floatatom and symbolatom" -> this is irrelevant 
to the definition of an atom, of a float, or of a symbol, in that you 
could make patches without ever using any atomboxes and you could 
still see all the characteristics of float values and symbol values 
shine through.

"Anything that is not a valid number is considered a symbol." -> this is 
only in the context of parsing, and only once the commas and semicolons 
are dealt with.

"The selector is a symbol, which appears in the patch as a non-numeric 
string with no white space, semicolons, or commas." -> the manual doesn't 
take into account any weird thing you can do in Pd, even with pure pd, and 
even without hand-editing any .pd files. E.g. this patch:

#N canvas 0 0 450 300 10;
#X obj 12 31 makefilename %d;
#X msg 12 13 123;
#X msg 12 67;
#X msg 12 49 set \$1 \, bang;
#X obj 12 85 f;
#X connect 0 0 3 0;
#X connect 1 0 0 0;
#X connect 2 0 4 0;
#X connect 3 0 2 0;

ends up saying:

   no method for '123'

but "no method for" errors always state the selector, and here, 123 is a 
selector, which is a symbol, but is printed in a way that makes it look 
like a float.

> Because of the way they are laid out, I don't think there is any 
> ambiguity between first element and selector in the help patches (I 
> don't think "selector" is used in any of them, but I'll check and make 
> sure).

Selector ought to be used to talk about all those so-called 
"meta-messages", not only because the Pd Manual does, but also because the 
manuals of several other programming languages call that same thing by the 
same name. It's not like selectors are a weird thing from outerspace that 
got stuck into Pd for no reason (even though some facts about Pd's 
selectors are a bit weird).

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec