@ingox Yes that helps a lot, thanks. I'm just getting started with this stuff and I guess I'm not really familiar with this paradigm and a lot of stuff just doesn't make much sense. I guess I could've started with something simpler.

Re. the pointer, I tried to save the list to a text object but it looks like once the pointers are translated into the real world and become (gpointer), there's no turning back. It looks like they work fine as long as they're hidden inside a [pointer] or a list object, but we can't see them. That's a bit weird.

@weightless tb.pd i modified your patch, it should work now

@weightless Yes, it seems they will always stay in the fog of struct mystery...

i love that you are getting into the topic. When you get the hang of it, it is not that bad to deal with them anymore and many nice things can be done.

@ingox I hope so. thanks for your help guys that's much appreciated.

@Jona Thanks for that, I guess my hope was to somehow be able to do the opposite, and send the id to [set] rather than using the foggy pointers.

@weightless i think i tried to build something like that (to choose a pointer via a float id)with @ingox

@weightless, i modified your patch again, now you can choose set with the id (updated) pointer-list-test_b.pd

@Jona wow, very very nice! Thanks Jona

@Jona Haha, the project was called pstore and i think it was almost finished (it actually works). Here it is: pstore.pd. It generates pointer objects via dynamic patching to store the pointers... Then we learned that it is possible to simply store them in lists.

It is just a guess, but i suppose that the concept of the pointers is derived from C, where pointers store addresses within the memory of the computer. It might be that this concept is what makes data structures so much more efficient than regular gui objects like toggles. Because you can directly access and modify data in the memory. But this is just an assumption...

@ingox that was a nice finding "Then we learned that it is possible to simply store them in lists." would be nice to know more about the concept of pure data data structures

here are 2 other data structure tutorials: https://github.com/megalon/pd-gui-examples (the bottom part is about ds)
https://github.com/megalon/pd-image-to-structs

@Jona Thanks for sharing those!

I made this patch to help with the color scheme for the data structure objects, very simple but a time saver.
struct.rgb.pd

@weightless thats something we implemented at the right bottom of the lissa-seq interface too: https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/10876/lissajous-midi-sequencer/4

@Jona Ah I completely missed it! I thought this was helpful to pop into a work-in-progress patch when trying to come up with nice colors.

That sequencer is excellent by the way, I must look at it again since when you posted it I knew nothing about data structures.

@weightless of course a nice way to test or change different colors

And, if you want to store a list ? if you define a list in the data stucture, it seems like it's ok but then, no way to set it or get it.

@Il-pleut here is an example:
https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/12059/array-text-pointer
here is another (experimental) use case:
https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/8836/dictionary-object-in-pd-extended/26

@Jona Thank you.