Sometimes pure data is really doing my head in and feels so counterintuitive
At the leftt there are three message boxes "-" "kick" and "hat " ..in Pure data world these are are (implicit)symbols.
The select module however does not identify these because there is NO symbol selector , this feels so counter intuitive .
When sending a list through a list store and retrieve the individual elements , a symbol selector is automatically added since the select module accepts these

@gentleclockdivider said:

I just keep struggling with these small things like forever

Try reading what I told you to check out. If you still have questions, let's talk.

@porres said:

So

I did read the manual , read the bang book , miller s puckette electronic music journal , Kreidler etc..
Please don't think I just glanse over certain sections , it's just that certain parts are used more heavily then others .and other areas are easier forgotten when not in rotation/practised ,, an some parts (selector identifier ) are still a bit of a grey area to me .
So please stop assuming I didn't read the manual , I would have never been able to make the stuff of the past year without reading the manual ( and I am talking purely about scheduling and events , not audio dsp )
I respect all the hard work you have done and still do ( mutable port is awesome 0 ) , you have made your point countless times ( and I won't be posting on facebook anymore )
I have no problem helping people out ( did that for decades on the reaktor forum ) , I ve been helped countless of times on the supercollider forum ( yes I did read the immense manual ) no one made a problem out of it .
For some reason you have a problem with it , I stopped crossposting like you suggested but you can't make me stop asking questions , be it here or on discord , and No I won't crosspost ( since you're everywhere you will probably notice )

@gentleclockdivider This might help...... tag.zip
Try things out with pd-selector.pd
I called the [route] problem a "bug" in the zip, but that is not the case. It is awkward to deal with though.
It was work in progress a while ago.
[rawprint] is one of my "must have" externals. It prints detail of the atoms comprising a message.

You will see in that patch at the bottom left that a message [list me 10 woof( will not behave as you might expect ....... because the first atom in the list (me) is a symbol.... so [list] is sometimes necessary... as @porres says in the previous post...
David.

@gentleclockdivider said:

So please stop assuming I didn't read the manual

Did you read the things I told you to right now? Are they clear? Don't they answer you? If not, how can I improve and explain it to you? what don't you get from it?

Sorry if I'm assuming wrong, but it'd be good if you showed that you read something and couldn't find your answers. And you know, sometimes we need to refer back to the docs to check something, so reading just once is not enough. You can post this on facebook, I'd answer the same thing.

@whale-av said:

Try things out with pd-selector.pd

Hi, you seem to have created some sort of abstraction that makes [route] match to list messages, huh?

Well, if that's the case, let me tell you all about [else/route2], which is also part of PlugData. I guess it can do all the things that people would expect [route] to do and this is why I wrote it.

I guess it's not clear from the description it can route to the first element of a list message, I will improve that description now.

@whale-av said:

Try things out with pd-selector.pd

hey, I see you're using [route] and [select] with many messages and trying to explain the results. What example do you have here that is not included in the help file? Also, I see you're sending a list message to [select] and to me it implies that it some how understands and deals with list message, which is not true, and is not documented either.

What happens there is what happens to any pd object when you send it a list and it doesn't expect a list method, it splits the list and distributes it to its inlets. So what you're doing is rewriting/replacing the argument in the right inlet.

This is why if you try to send 11 23 into [select me] you will get the error "inlet: expected 'symbol' but got 'float'"

@porres I cannot remember to tell the truth as it was a long time ago. Yes, I believe what started my "investigation" (learning session) was finding that a list could be distributed across the inlets....which surprised me for this object.
Maybe that could be described as a bug, as I cannot see that anyone would ever have used it for any purpose, and it can cause problems.
David.

@gentleclockdivider When you need to turn a list into a message remember that the only difference between them is the list has a list selector so [list prepend set] -> [list trim] will do the same and save you from endlessly having to add and remove dollar arguments from your [set $1 $2 $3...( messages as your list length changes, and it also works with listbox since it also has the set method.

If you are dealing with lists, uses list objects even if you are trying to turn that list into a message, it will make life easier and often you find you don't even need the message, the list objects will handle it all. Despite being able to click on them messages are not actually UI objects, hence their not showing up in GOPs, they are for constructing those internal messages which lack selectors like all those methods for [list store] and why they produce an error if you click on one with a dollar argument in it and needing a list or symbol selector in them when you want to use them for a list or a symbol.

@whale-av said:

Maybe that could be described as a bug, as I cannot see that anyone would ever have used it for any purpose

I'd bet that the following theorem is true:

All Turing-complete languages contain useless statements

@whale-av said:

Maybe that could be described as a bug, as I cannot see that anyone would ever have used it for any purpose, and it can cause problems

well, just to add to the discussion, this is not a bug at all. It is a feature of Pd that is meaningless for this object, and it is also meaningless or very silly to other objects. It's just that disabling this feature for this object would be quite work, as you'd need to create a special handling of a list method.

This feature just bypasses the need of the [unpack] object. If you wanted to have a list unpacked and then distributed to both inlets of [sel], that wouldn't be a bug, just something not really meaningful or useful. There are many silly and meaningless things you could do in a Pd patch, it doesn't mean it's a bug or something.

FWIW, as someone who is no stranger to programming concepts, I have to say that I've gotten tripped up on datatype selectors more than once. They are "basic" but I wouldn't say intuitive.

With that said, I sometimes joke that Pd shows us where Miller Puckette learned from Max's mistakes. E.g., Max's [poly~] is... hoo boy... the hacks. The. Hacks. ... where [clone] is (relatively) clean, direct, minimal. Or [/ 2] is integer division by default in Max (nobody wants this). Or the fact that Pd's timing model includes sub-audio-block timing.

Still, inconsistencies remain.

One might reasonably expect at least [symbol abc] to pass through both [select abc] and [route abc] -- but [select] requires the symbol tag, and [route] rejects it. Of course there is some principle in there somewhere, but I maintain, that's pretty weird: two objects that perform matching, that require differently-formatted input.

hjh

[route] only matches to the 1st element, and passes the rest of the message. It would more properly need to handle lists... in the case of a symbol, it's kinda pointless to send it to route, as you can only have a bang output, and this is not the purpose of that object. It is the point of the [select] object though.

I don't think this is an issue for [route] at all. Having said that, [route] has many issues. It has inconsistencies (like how it doesn't trim the symbol selector). I don't debate about its bad design. That's why I wrote [route2] and I also have [routetype] and [routeall]... in [route2] it can manage a list message and route the rest.

This is not about the language concept and design, it's about the object design. I see design problems in many object, but hey, help file is there to show how the object works one way or another, even if it has inconsistencies.

@whale-av