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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Sep 6, 2011, at 4:21 PM, <martin.peach at sympatico.ca> <martin.peach at sympatico.ca 
 > wrote:

>
>
> From: hans at at.or.at
> To: martin.peach at sympatico.ca
> Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2011 15:57:32 -0400
> CC: pd-list at iem.at
> Subject: Re: [PD] (breaking symbols) was Re: find a list of numbers  
> in a	text file
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> I think someone might well want to make an external that can take  
> 'four' as 4. Or a symbol '4+2' that would become a float 6.0.
> And obviously Pd should not be doing that all the time because most  
> of the time that is not the right thing to do.
> The disaster would be if Pd tried to guess what the user intends  
> based on some general idea of what Pd is 'for'.
> For instance I've been working on an xbee external where I need to  
> specify numbers like 0x0a060123 for the remote address.
> I do that by interpreting the symbol as a 64-bit integer internally  
> but I would not expect any other external to do this unless it needs  
> to.
> Otherwise the user would have to manually convert the number (which  
> is conventionally given in hexadecimal form) into a bunch of decimal  
> numbers small enough to be represented as float and then the  
> external would combine them internally.
>
> Martin
>


Yeah, I agree, I have no problem if someone wants to make an externals  
that interprets 4+2 or "four" as 4, but it doesn't seem like something  
that should be in the core.

About hex 0x form, that could conceivably fall under the "anything  
that looks like a number is a float", as least for programmers.  In  
most programming languages, 0x10 is just a number like 16.

.hc

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