@ingox I wasn't aware -- I tried [makefilename %f] but didn't think to put the float in afterwards. help file says that mode is currently broken so I didn't investigate further.

thanks for pointing me to that! it was fun all the same.

I was so grateful to find a solution to this that I ended up spending the rest of the evening rewriting the patch to accommodate a decimal point. maybe not very elegant, but here it is in case anyone else needs to stay in vanilla:

stof.pd

@LiamG said:

@whale-av said:

At the time I could see no way around it in 0.46-7.

Challenge accepted! I'm not saying that this is an elegant solution, but it will convert symbol-floats to real floats using only Vanilla objects. Things get confusing if you start feeding it regular symbols, though...