[PD] Hide backslash escapes in symbol atoms

[Alexandre Torres Porres]

I remember that discussion (I can try and find it) and I remember people
agreed symbol box should hide "\".

I guess I can agree to that. In my idea, we know what's coming out of a
symbol box, it's a symbol, so if you have a symbol with a space, then we
know that the space is 'escaped' (that is, we're not splitting this into
two atoms).

But I think print should keep it, in the same way we also need to keep it
for message boxes.

Outside the context of a symbol box, it is important to differentiate if we
have, for instance, a list where one of the items contains an escaped space.

like, the message:

| list one\ item two <

has two atoms "one item" and "two", and print should be able to tell us
that.

Now, I don't know about the new list box. What if we want to create a list
with an escaped space? It seems like a special and different case/context
of a symbol box. By the way, I've been testing it and it seems we can do
this by putting the escaped character ourselves. That seems correct. But it
would be different than the symbol box and maybe I guess it shouldn't be
too problematic that the symbol box also shows escaped characters. They're
not that common and we can document why this happens when it happens.

cheers

Em qui., 18 de nov. de 2021 às 11:42, Roman Haefeli <reduzent at gmail.com>
escreveu:

> Hi all
>
> It's just a cosmetic thing, nevertheless it concerns me.
>
> Up to 0.50, usage of whitespaces in symbol atoms was good. As in:
> Whitespaces could be used while typing into symbol atoms and the
> displayed value showed only the whitespaces without the backslashes for
> escaping them, while saving symbols containing whitespaces in text
> would add the backslashes as a way to preserve the symbol for next
> read.
>
> Since 0.51, things regarding backslashes are quite messy. Backslashes
> are hidden in iemgui labels, but displayed in symbol atoms and print
> output. There is/was an issue about that on Github which I'm unable to
> spot right now that contained a lengthy discussion about the pros and
> cons of the current (imho: messy) situation.
>
> I don't quite understand if the change between 0.50 and 0.51 was
> intentional or simply a side effect of other fixes. However, I would
> very much prefer to get the old behavior back.
>
> I propose to distinguish the FUDI-encoded value from the FUDI-decoded
> value. As long as the message is FUDI-encoded - I write it down to a
> file or I send through the network - the backslashes should be kept.
> However, when I decode the FUDI message, for instance, when I take a
> symbol from a message and display it with a symbol atom, the backslash
> should not be displayed, since I want to display the decoded value.
> Otherwise there is no way to ever get back the decoded value.
>
> I'm not sure about [print], but considering it already skips the 'list'
> selector for lists starting with a number or the 'float' selector for
> number messages, I consider it to display the decoded value and thus it
> should display symbols without backslash escaping.
>
> Roman
>
>
>
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