[PD] 64-bit accumulator external

[Charles Z Henry]

The double precision testing thread leads me to comment on an external
I've been writing.  I decided I needed an external (with 32-bit
signals input) that would add up blocks of signals over time with an
internal 64-bit accumulator to avoid losing precision during this
step.

But as I thought about other options for it to perform (sample-wise
accumulation, sum of squares, whether the output should be
normalized), it started turning into a real swiss army knife, one
object with a ton of configuration choices, outputs, and control
options.  It could be used to read long tables with tabread4~~ for
instance, or turn distributions into normalized cumulative
distribution functions.  There would be the option of retrieving the
full 64-bit value on the output through pairs of signals/messages or
truncating the precision back to 32-bits with a single output.

When signals fan in to a inlet they are summed together in 32-bits, so
that has to be avoided.  Should I have it use a variable number of
inlets or make new objects that have multiple inlets?

Yikes... what am I doing?  Is there a different question here?  What
set of 64-bit externals could do all the things a double-precision Pd
*could* do?  You only really lose precision when doing certain things.
Is there a better way to organize the functions for usage among
several objects?  Which ones are essential?  What set would make it
complete?  Yikes...

In the same manner as the PdCUDA signal memory space and perform
routine duplication (I designed but never published an
implementation), you could control whether objects used a 32-bit
signal memory space and dsp functions vs a 64-bit version of the same.
You'd control the behavior through the dspcontext struct and add an
object to switch it on/off in subpatches, thus using the double
precision only when you need it.  Array design and implementation
remains problematic.  This is a terrible idea.

I'll go ahead and build something for my immediate usage (after my
classes conclude in 2 weeks) that does just a few things, but I have
to wonder if there's something better there that should be done
instead.  Any advice?

Chuck