[L2Ork-dev] request for mentorship: comment parsing

[Jonathan Wilkes]

Hi list,

Anyone have a sane approach to prevent comments from
being interpreted by the parser?

Purr Data at least makes this explicit-- you see your comment
data get interpreted immediately upon comment instantiation.
In Pd Vanilla it happens after the patch containing the comment
is saved and reloaded. Pd Vanilla's approach means that

See:

https://git.purrdata.net/jwilkes/purr-data/issues/467

One possibility would be to convert ASCII 32 to ASCII 160 ( ).
This can be done completely in the GUI and will display correctly
in Pd Vanilla, too.

However, this creates a single A_SYMBOL per comment. That would
quickly hit Pd's MAXPDSTRING limit and truncate data, which we
don't want.

Another possibility would be to find an algorithm that uses ASCII 32
between items that would ordinarily get parsed as A_SYMBOL, and
just use ASCII 160 to glue together A_FLOAT atoms to each other,
or to glue an A_FLOAT to a neighbor A_SYMBOL.

However, that *still* would result in data loss in certain cases like
going over MAXPDSTRING limit by gluing an A_FLOAT to what
would have been a legally sized A_SYMBOL.

I don't see any sensible solution to this. Does anyone else?

If not, I'd like to close the above issue and just accept the awful
limitation that Pd comments have.

-Jonathan