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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Sep 6, 2011, at 1:16 PM, <martin.peach at sympatico.ca> <martin.peach at sympatico.ca 
 > wrote:

>
>
> > Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2011 08:12:15 +0200
> > From: fbar at footils.org
> > To: hans at at.or.at
> > CC: pd-list at iem.at
> > Subject: Re: [PD] (breaking symbols) was Re: find a list of  
> numbers in a text file
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 02:34:30PM -0400, Hans-Christoph Steiner  
> wrote:
> > >
> > > Then having the patch rely on the "error: float: no method for
> > > 'symbol'" error that is normally generated in that case.
> >
> > Well, it prints an error because there *is* an error in the patch.  
> The
> > author should never have converted a float to a symbol and expect to
> > still do float calculations with it.
> >
>
> Yes, I think it ought to be up to the external to implement its own  
> symbol-to-float converter since there is no universally valid way of  
> doing it.
> The same pattern will have different meanings in different context  
> and Pd can't be expected to know what is expected in a specific case.
>
> Martin

That sounds like a recipe for disaster, then we end up with multiple,  
incompatible ways of doing this.  I don't think anyone is proposing  
that symbols like "four" get converted to 4, but only symbols like 43,  
5.22, -234, etc.  Things that can be directly converted from a char*  
to a float with a standard function.

.hc


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

"Making boring techno music is really easy with modern tools, but with  
live coding, boring techno is much harder." - Chris McCormick




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