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

[Frank Barknecht]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 01:36:34PM -0400, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> On Sep 5, 2011, at 1:11 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> 
> >On Sun, 4 Sep 2011, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> >>So in the sense of Pd, anything that can be intepreted as a
> >>number should be. 

This discussion is soooo 2005 ... 

Anyway, a symbol, even if it consists only of digits, will not be
interpreted as a number in Pd: a symbol is a symbol, a float is a float.
Note that the sentence that you quote sometimes and which sounds similar
to the statement above ("Anything that is not a valid number os [sic!]
considered a symbol." from
http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/Pd_documentation/x2.htm#s3.1) is talking about
the content of [object boxes] (or more generally: about the Pd editor).
Here this sentence is true, but you know that not every data entity in
Pd can be used in object boxes as name or argument, while most things
that looks like a number will become one here.

> >> 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.

What errors would patches rely on that use [makefilename %d] to generate
a symbol? 

Ciao
-- 
Frank