João Pais wrote:
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).
High moral feeling (i.e. the "we're better because we're free" logo) isn't enough for precision dsp.
Ok, so what your're saying is that for closed software, users have to wait for the owner of the software to add some feature, while for open source software, users have the possibility to add whatever feature they want.
I wasn't even going there, was speaking only about quality of performance.
Since you bring this topic in, you shouldn't say "users", because I (and
many people I know) can't do anything about improving the pd code until I
learn enough about C programming, and that won't be happening in this
life. In this case, "user" is the adequate name because she's working
alone (with help of others, but she's doing the work alone), and if this
user has better projects to develop, this feature won't go ahead.
And, in the way things are implemented, even if she manages to make double
versions of all branches of Pd (vanilla + ext in all build systems) and
maintain them in the next years, doesn't mean that this will ever caught
up in pd-core (pd-van) - looking at the current tradition, it will take a
long time.
Both positions can take a while for a feature, so, what's your point ?
Try considering openness as a technical feature.
I'm saying that just because the software is free/open, doesn't make it
better for one task than it's non-free partners (the inverse applies as
well, of course). And sometimes just saying "here it's better, because
there is no eye candy and people have to learn how to "really" program"
doesn't improve the quality of the program as a whole.
About "openness", I'm not interested in theoretical openness, because we
don't live in a theoretical world. Development depends on real people, and
if they can manage to allocate time and effort to create concrete things
(code, in this example). I'm sure there's lots of open code around svn or
other repositories which isn't going anywhere, openness isn't making it
develop itself.