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

[Frank Barknecht]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 02:13:01PM -0400, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> About hex 0x form, that could conceivably fall under the "anything
> that looks like a number is a float", as least for programmers.

I really disagree with your assumption, that in Pd, "anything that looks
like a number is a float". This is simlpy not how Pd  works or is
programmed, it's not in the manual [1] and [makefilename %d] proves the
opposite is true: Some symbols can indeed look a lot like numbers. I
think, your wrong premise leads to wrong conclusions and should be
reconsidered.

[1] Here are some occurrences of you premise: 
- "Anything that is not a valid number os considered a symbol."
appears in "2.1.2. object boxes" and talks about object boxes.

"2.3.1. anatomy of a message" "The selector is a symbol, which appears
in the patch as a non-numeric string with no white space, semicolons, or
commas". Note the "appears in a patch", which again hints at the
well-known "feature" of the editor to convert things that look like
numbers to floats.

Same chapter: "It is possible to type messages which start with a
number, which cannot be used as a selector." Note the "type".

Ciao
-- 
Frank