Is mini-notation-@ not actually stepcat?

[senritsu]

Hey there,

Please help me understand why those two snippets don't actually do the same thing:

$: "<[c d]@3>".note()

$: cat(stepcat([3, "[c d]"])).note()

according to the docs, cat is just <> and stepcat should just be @, but it's clearly not.

cat+stepcat squeezes everything in one cycle, while <> + @ seems to have an implicit slow? This next snippet does actually seem to match the first mini notation snippet:

$: cat(stepcat([3, "[c d]"]).slow(3)).note()

Is x@y actually stepcat([y, x]).slow(y) and not just stepcat? Am I just completely misunderstanding how stepcat works and/or is supposed to work?

Not-quite unrelated, how do people usually put together parts with changing meters? Like what's the idiomatic way of for example alternating parts in 5/8 and 7/8. I haven't really gotten anything out of the docs regarding this, although I am quite sure it's mostly to do with me not having wrapped my brain fully around thinking in cycles. Something like <foo@5 bar@7 foo@5 bar@7 baz@2> seems to work, but led me to the above confusion, so I assume that's not the way.