[PD] no pd?? WTF ????

[João Pais]

>> And that's not the end of the vicious cycle.
>> Students who saved their money to buy a Max license are often unwilling  
>> to
>> accept that their work could have been done as easy in Pd, and  
>> sometimes even
>> better and/or easier.
>
> If you think of free
> software as an ethical issue like I do and are talking about free  
> programs that have a
> proprietary alternative, there is still an important division between  
> those programs that are
> free and superior to their proprietary counterparts on practical  
> grounds, and those that
> don't have the same feature set as their proprietary counterparts (but  
> are still quite good).
>
> In terms of ease of patching, Pd is clearly in the latter camp-- Max has  
> infinite undo, a
> "Tidy Up" that actually _does_ something useful, and a set of externals  
> that allows to make
> multiple connections at once and lots of other shortcuts (maybe these  
> are part of the core now,
> I'm not sure).  Plus tooltips, anchors to resize guis/boxes/messages,  
> and probably lots of
> other things that make patching easier.
>
> I use Pd and free software (almost) exclusively, but we should be clear  
> about which features
> are available and which are not.

and you're only talking about the aesthetical/workflow features. to bring  
up a subject that I am paying attention only now, try out to see how high  
you go with [expr pow(2,$f1)] until you loose resolution - 20 in pd, but  
30 in max5 (the coming up of Pd double precision will help this, but it's  
a work Katja is doing alone).
Which means, for example, in max you have more resolution than Pd to  
control the playback of large arrays with precision (up to 2147483647,  
around 12h of audio at 48KHz). High moral feeling (i.e. the "we're better  
because we're free" logo) isn't enough for precision dsp.