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

[Jonathan Wilkes]

----- Original Message -----
> From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>
> To: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>
> Cc: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>; "pd-list at iem.at" <pd-list at iem.at>; Chris McCormick <chris at mccormick.cx>; Miller Puckette <msp at ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Monday, September 5, 2011 1:11 PM
> Subject: Re: [PD] (breaking symbols) was Re: find a list of numbers in a text file
> 
> 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.
> 
>>  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.
> 
>>  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.

And that's what I want for Pd.

However, I wonder if this would cause more instances of people running out of 
memory from filling up the symbol table.  Currently if you generate an error from 
sending a symbol atom where a float is expected, you know something screwy is 
going on, post to the list, and figure out the problem and generate float-atoms 
instead.  However, if that's not an error, you increase the chance of someone 
needlessly generating lots of unique symbol-atoms (maybe with an accumulator, 
or importing them from a database as symbol-atoms instead of floats), and having
problems or crashes that are less obvious.

-Jonathan

> 
> They don't call it duck-typing though, and no-one does.

duck-taping?  No.

How about goose-for-duck-swapping?  As in you send a duck (A_SYMBOL), and 
if the object expects a number then Pd swaps the duck for a goose (A_FLOAT).

> 
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>