[PD] curly braces in Pd

[Alexandre Torres Porres]

So, we've been actually discussing this on github and maybe others can
participate over there, check
https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/issues/505

or... maybe we can use this thread instead... :) seems like github
discussions are always more limited.

The thing in the way now is wether "{" and "}" should be officially
incorporated with a new syntax, like nested lists. There are arguments
against as in the last message by christof here and I agree and think we
could just let "{" and "}" be supported as regular characters and that we
can expand the usage of dollar signs for expanding Pd's syntax, like ${ and
$}

And, also, I'd like to point that there are forks of Pd that actually
already allow "{" and "}"... I can see why one would disregard this, but
it's something worth noting. You can already do this in PlugData and
PurrData/Pd-L2ork, and the patches actually work and are already compatible
to Pd Vanilla.

I also don't see an expansion of the language syntax coming up very soon or
easily, so just allowing "{" and "}" could be good to at least get this
issue out of the way, since it's been bugging people for edge cases for
ages.

What do you people say?

cheers

Em dom., 8 de jan. de 2023 às 16:15, Christof Ressi <info at christofressi.com>
escreveu:

> > the fact that curlies (that is: a pair of matching characters) have
> > been forbidden until now is a unique opportunity.
> Well, they have not been forbidden. You can not *type* them (yet), but
> they can appear in text files or in manually assembled symbols. In fact,
> they are properly displayed with [print] or list/symbol atoms, which
> suggests that they are already properly escaped when sent to the GUI.
> One could argue that someone who only uses libpd might not even be aware
> of this issue.
>
> Curly braces have never been a part of special Pd symbols (semicolon,
> colon, dollar), so I'm sceptical that we can just give them some
> meaning. It would break lots of existing code that uses symbols with
> curly braces. For example, it would completely break the "purest_json"
> library.
>
> However, we could use *escaped* curly braces. The escape sequences "\{"
> and "\}" are not defined, so we might use those for nested lists. I'm
> not saying it's pretty, though.
>
> ---
>
> Anyway, it's a bit silly that we still can't type curly braces, given
> how important they are for many use cases. I mean, I cannot even type a
> JSON string...
>
> Christof
>
>
>
>
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