Thanks :-D
BTW, Symbols in sclang work the same way. Also, they are frequently used
in scripting languages. In this context, this is also referred to as
"string interning", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_interning
Christof
On 22.02.2024 15:38, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay wrote:
This is by far the best explanation of symbols I’ve read, ever.
Thanks!
On 22 Feb 2024, at 13:41, Christof Ressi <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
Pd symbols are immutable and permanent. `gensym("foo")` looks if the symbol
"foo" already exists; if yes, it just returns it, otherwise it creates a new symbol, adds
it to the global symbol table and finally returns it.
You must never attempt to free a symbol!
```
t_symbol **x_weights_arrays;
t_symbol *x_biases_array;
```
Here you must only free `x_weights_array`, which is an array of `t_symbol*`,
but not the `t_symbol*` elements themselves.
---
Side note: since symbols are unique and persistent, they can be compared *by
address*. In other words, two symbols are equal if they have the same address.
This is different from ordinary C-strings which may reside at different memory
locations and thus need to be compared with `strcmp()` (or equivalent
functions).
Christof
On 22.02.2024 10:19, Alexandros Drymonitis wrote:
I have a data structure with a symbol and an array of symbols that store array
names defined as:
```
t_symbol **x_weights_arrays;
t_symbol *x_biases_array;
```
When I'm done with them, I want to free the memory, but calling
free(x_biases_array) doesn't seem to work, and once called, as soon as I try to
do something else in Pd (like unlock the patch and choose an object), Pd
crashes.
I have narrowed down the error to freeing these symbols, and I'm sure the crash
is not caused by something else. I scanned m_pd.h to see if there is a function
to free t_symbol memory, but didn't seem to find anything. This might be
something obvious for C-savvy people, but I'm not one, so any advice is welcome.
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