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