[PD] (breaking symbols) was Re: find a list of numbers in a text file

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Sep 5, 2011, at 1:11 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> On Sun, 4 Sep 2011, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>> I think you are missing the point of what I am saying.  I am not  
>> saying with we implement a strict duck typing mimicing Ruby or  
>> Python.
>
> I think you are missing the point of what I am saying. I am saying  
> that you are using the wrong words for that.

Unfortunately terms to describe typing do not have clear boundaries.   
But which words are used are not important to me, as long as the  
meaning gets across.  Does "dynamic typing" make you happy?  Python,  
Ruby, Perl, Tcl, and to a large extent Pd, all have "dynamic typing".


>> So in the sense of Pd, anything that can be intepreted as a number  
>> should be. But that's in conflict with having symbols that have  
>> things that can be intepreted as a number.  So make Pd consistent,  
>> either it needs to be illegal to have symbols that can be  
>> interpreted as a number,
>
> This could break some existing patches.


Do you have an examples?  That would be very helpful.  Off the top of  
my head, it seems that it would only break patches that rely on  
errors, which is not a very common situation.

hc


>
>> or maybe symbols that can be interpreted as a number behave like a  
>> float when something is expecting a float.
>
> That's what Tcl and Perl do for ints, floats and strings.
>
> They don't call it duck-typing though, and no-one does.
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> | Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray,  
> Montréal, QC





----------------------------------------------------------------------------

"[T]he greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own  
government." - Martin Luther King, Jr.