Is there a way in pd to have a sequence of symbols that you can output one at a time?

I saw a thread on this forum suggesting that data structures would be useful for this, but I couldn't get it to work -- [append] has no method for "symbol." (Unfortunately I can't find that thread again now.)

Then I found an old pd list post where Miller Puckette admitted that data structures had not been fully debugged. So, even though the documentation states that symbols may be stored in data structures, it seems this is not actually the case.

Is there any other way?

I find it hard to imagine that it would be completely unsupported to have a sequence of strings? (Because nobody ever needed to do this before...?)

At worst, I suppose I could store numbers in a table and just require that sections have numeric identifiers instead of meaningful names. It would really be a shame if I had to do that, though.

Thanks,
hjh

i don't really know, if i got you right - do you want to store incoming symbols (letters, strings,...) in a list? then you could use

x

Actually, in that post, I wasn't thinking of lists at all -- I said "data structures" -- but I realized later that lists would be a better (maybe the only) solution. ([append] referred to http://puredata.info/docs/manuals/pd/x2.htm#s9.2 -- nothing to do with "list append.")

I was thinking of [coll] from Max, which stores arbitrary data under (usually) numeric keys. I had thought pd's data structures could do that, but that won't work as long as a data structure can store only floats.

I opened this thread because a documented feature -- "In general, data structures are built from four data types: scalar floats and symbols..." -- is not in fact supported. If there's no bug report for this, one ought to be opened. I'm attaching a patch to reproduce the bug.

I have a feeling the "fix" was to disallow symbols, but then not to update the documentation to reflect the change. I'll admit, it was a wee bit frustrating to wrap my head around traversing a data structure (not the simplest thing in the world) only to find that it couldn't do what I wanted...

In any case, I just found list-dripslow, which will do exactly what I need, so I can meet my immediate needs (and definitely more simply!).

hjh

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/struct-vs-symbol-bug.pd