[PD] curly braces in Pd

[Alexandre Torres Porres]

Em sex., 13 de jan. de 2023 às 17:13, Christof Ressi <info at christofressi.com>
escreveu:

> 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.
>
Yup, true, I mentioned it in my first message on this thread about the
support in [text], which is one of the possible hacks we already have in Pd
to deal with them, as well as using things like [list tosymbol]. These are
also good points to just "let it go" and officially and fully supporting
them by just dropping the filter that prevents us from typing this into
messages.




> 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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