[PD] curly braces in Pd

[Christof Ressi]

> I agree and think we could just let "{" and "}" be supported as 
> regular characters
Just for the sake of clarity: "{" and "}" have never been "forbidden" in 
Pd message, you just cannot /type /them.*)

Christof

*) Actually, you can already type them in [text] windows.

On 13.01.2023 21:03, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
> 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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