[PD] opening patch from pd message

[Peter P.]

* IOhannes m zmölnig <zmoelnig at iem.at> [2019-11-26 16:03]:
> Am 26. November 2019 15:49:07 MEZ schrieb Roman Haefeli <reduzent at gmail.com>:
> >On Tue, 2019-11-26 at 15:12 +0100, Csaba Láng wrote:
> >> Dear list,
> >> 
> >> I want to open from a pd patch a pd patch withe the message:
> >> 
> >> [;
> >> pd open $1.pd /path-topatch;(
> >
> >[...]
> >
> >> just to be clear, if I want to open cat.pd, a message [cat( will not
> >> make it happen.
> >
> >Use [symbol cat(.
> 
> 
> and if you have many, many files (msgboxes) you can convert (almost) any selector toa symbol with [symbol]:

jumping on this I must admit that I never understood when a selector
such as "symbol" or "list" has to be provided explicitely, or to be
trimmed off.

>From https://puredata.info/docs/manuals/pd/x2.htm#s3.1 I understand that
the message
	[1(
has an implicit selector of "float" and is equivalent to
	[float 1(

Also the message
	[1 2 3(
has an implicit selector of "list" and is equivalent to
	[list 1 2 3(

It seems the selector is always a symbol (one or many characters
without whitespace nor semicolons nor commas).

It seems symbols themselves have no selector(?) as
	[foo(
seems to be the selector "foo" itself and is not the same as
	[symbol foo(
at least not when printing to the console window.

Now is this why 
	[cat(
in the original poster's question did not have a selector "symbol" and
one had to be added eg. with [symbol]. Was this because it was used in
another message box or in a $1 substitution?

A message [stop( to a [delay] object does not require "stop" to be
prefixed by a "symbol" selector. 

Why does this still seem a mixup of symbols with and symbols without a
"symbol" selector to me? Can this be clarified somehow?

Thanks to everyone,
P