Anyway, having these as an option would be nice, but apart from imPd they haven't arrived yet.
They are not in IMPD. I only made something that renders them as randomly-placed (within certain bounds) and made splines out of it. That was 20 lines of code. It would have been a damn lot more to also get the mouse working with them, add a patchcord menu, make them load and save, send a patch to miller to make "regular pd" at least keep the segmentation info while editing, etc...
The screenshots of IMPD are in
i think this is the best example http://artengine.ca/matju/impd/gallery/segmented4.gif
would be nice to have "intelligent wires".
this is a feature like that in PCB software (tools for designing circuits). given a netlist (here, a collection of inlets) with a list of nodes that should be connected together, the program find the best path for each connection, i.e. by following a grid. (there are well known algorithms about this)... and avoiding crossing objects or other wires (useful when you connect many>one inlets or vice-versa).
then this path can be rendered with lines, bezier, exp, various f(n)'s.... and you don't have to store those segments information in the patch, because they are computed by a kinda of AI :)
what do you think about it?