[PD] more strings to translate

[Jonathan Wilkes]

----- Original Message -----
> From: Pierre-Olivier Boulant <po.boulant at free.fr>
> To: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>; PD-List <pd-list at iem.at>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 7:52 PM
> Subject: Re: [PD] more strings to translate
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I translated that last bunch of keywords for the search plug-in. Some are not 
> that easy to understand out of context. To me, if the keywords are to be 
> usable/understandable to new comers I suggest they could also have a more 
> explicit indication to help. I mean "anything_op" is not really 
> straight forward. It could say something like "operates on any kind of 
> data" to make things a bit clearer.
> Short keywords in the [pd META] are ok, it's just so that the interface is 
> accessible to anyone.

That's a special one.  Basically this is any object that has an "anything"
method, and which can output a message with any selector that matched the
"anything" method in the first place.

What it boils down to is this: will the object in question send output (possibly generated
from multiple inputs) which ends up generating a badly formed Pd message?

Example: message box

Demo:

[set float boat, bang(
|
[(

Verdict: Clicking the first message box will successfully fill the second
message box with the text "float boat", but the "bang" will output an error
because "float boat" isn't a well formed Pd message.  Therefore, message box
is an anything_op

Quite simply, an anything_op is a poorly designed object.  You'll see many of
the results of the query for that keyword are objects that are now made
obsolete by [list split], [list append], etc.  (I should probably add a clause to
the anything_op definition to explain that most of those objects are either
obsolete or convenience objects for people coming from Max.)

The [textfile] object is another one-- it isn't obsolete but it suffers from the same
problem. If I remember correctly it can't even parse Pd files
with impunity because you might end up with a line that starts with the word
float (as in a data structure definition) followed by a symbol atom.

That's all to say that "anything_op" should not be applied to objects simply
because they happen to have an anything method.  Rather it's to delineate
old, mostly obsolete objects, originally for my own curiosity but going forward
to group objects with similar functionality and limitations.

-Jonathan

> 
> Cheers
> pob