A check on Max/MSP programming conventions;

that is max.
he is the inventor of artistic ice skating on some kind of blue quadratic record player using magic wands. some say he would also have invented music, but that is a misunderstandment.

at v2 the program was calles max/fts (faster than sound)

with v3 the program changed owner and was called max.

then for v3.5 a signal externals collection called MSP (max signal processing) was sold extra.

with v4 it was included, so max was called max/msp.

later with v6 jitter was added for free, too, and then max was called max again.

because there are a lot of differences between these three domains people usually think in "max", "msp" and "jitter" and seperate them from each other. "did you made that with jitter?" - "no, that´s made with max" (==i used [lcd] and [picturecontrol] for the GUI)

however, there are also objects from the jitter bundle which do only audio or only data rate. wherever there is a rule, there is an exception...

i personally see jit.gl. as an extra domain, too.

they way we communicate about data in max mostly comes from how data is represented in the [message] object; the differences between 1 2 3, "1 2 3" and 1, 2, 3 should not be underestimated.

but in case i ever tell you to send "7" into a max object, you can safely assume that i mean as int, and not as symbol (i.e. i only wanted to make clear that it is a message, not which message type.)

and yes, in earlier max versions you had to use single quotes in messageboxes to create a message of data type symbol. but since v5 (i think) it also allows you to use double quotes.

they are easier to find on a windows keyboard, the only disadvantage of doublequotes is that it is now a bit more complicated to create symbols (=strings/characters) which start and end with the character ", while it is a very rare task, it can break old patches from ancient times which do this.

max users do not need to care that everything in max are atoms, they only have to care about ->data types in max and how they appear in the patching canvas.

the third party [printit] object is the best teacher for that kind of thing and can also help to hunt down bugs.

as you can see, the [printit] output also "wrongly" uses the double quotes to denote the data type symbol, while in fact what max sends around is symbol 7

the "infinetly" part of max should not scare you, unless you plan to program your own compiled externals with their own logic and data types. only then it is actually infinetly. 95% of the factory objects share the same paradigms and patterns over and over again.