[PD] pow/pow~ and negative input, a fix proposal

[Alexandre Torres Porres]

Hi, I'm basically reviving a discussion I found on the list archive from 5
years ago, see:
https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2013-04/102279.html

Not much came out of it besides the assumption this could be a concern to
prevent inf/nan results!

As in:

[-1(
|[pow 0.5]
|


I can see that, because we have other examples like that in Pd, like
log/log~ outputing -1000 for <= 0 inputs.

But still, that's not a good reason to prevent something like:

[-1 (
|[pow 2]


So I did a Pull Request where I still make it output "0" when pow/pow~
would give 'inf' or 'nan' but still allow us to calculate the power of
negative numbers. Here it is:
https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/356 (In another commit, 'm also
proposing log to behave like log~ anyway)

I come to the list to query if anyone thinks there might be a concern in
expanding the behaviour of pow/pow~

I personally cannot think of any use case where someone relies on pow(-1,
2) generating "0", it just seems wrong to me (i.e. a bug) and allowing it
to do that wouldn't break things.

cheers
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