i thought ints were made up of less bits than floats, so why is it sayng that ints are bad? i don't need decimal places in my patch.

@4ZZ4 It is just that there is no such atom type in Pd.
Every message in Pd is preceded by an atom type header.
float
symbol
pointer
........ and other "user-defined" like list
There are others.... but not "integer"..... https://puredata.info/docs/developer/AtomTypes
For a trigger you can also put a........ so [t a a]...... for "anything" and l for "list".
So [t a l f s p] is possible.
And of course b for "bang".
David.

@whale-av thanks