Jesus, I wasn't responding to the specific example, nor was I saying you can do *everything* in Pd without externals. I too would love [coll] and [zl] in pd-vanilla. I'm also not saying you can easily build copies of them in vanilla, just that it is possible for certain things depending on what you need. By "seeing the vanilla light", I mean more that there are some things I needed externals for that I can replace and others I can reduce to a usable set for what I need ala rjdj. This is mainly because I will now need to target both desktop PD and a libpd environment.

Also, I've never had to sort a list of symbols, so our workflow is different. I mainly use PD for sound only and do graphics/other tasks separately.


I didn't mean to bring up an externals vs vanilla debate. We obviously use what's best for the situation. I'm choosing to work more in vanilla land because I simply can't include some externals in my app. Plus, I know those patches will *just work* for everyone.

And what I'm saying is that some of those abstractions will _not_ *just work* for everyone because of the severe
limitations of working in Pd Vanilla without any externals.  You can't easily change [symbolarray] to accommodate
an array of lists instead of an array of symbols, and you cannot easily add a sorting mechanism because
splitting symbols in Pd is difficult and slow.  For someone coming from Max's [coll] and [zl] and finding [textfile]/
[qlist] inadequate for their list-of-list handling needs I find it very unlikely that [symbolarray] would suit their
needs.


We'll see in practice if this works, but I'd much rather avoid coding custom externals for this project.


Also, does anyone know what cyclone's license is? I can't find the current version in the svn, but the old zip on the website has a BSD-like license. Having [coll] and [seq] would be very useful. It'd be nice to see these in vanilla at some point ... why reinvent the wheel?

Look in [pd META] in the help patches for both those objects and it should tell you the license.
SIBSD = Standard Improved BSD (which isn't a "standard" name for this license at all so we should
probably change the terminology at some point) = 3-clause BSD

-Jonathan



[1] You can certainly split symbols and count their length in Pd vanilla but it ain't
pretty.

[list-sort] in list-abs.


It only works for lists of floats:


[list abigail aardvark(
|
[list-abs/list-sort]
|
[print]

print: list-sort: Warning: dropped a non-number from list
print: list-sort: Warning: dropped a non-number from list
print: bang



--------
Dan Wilcox
danomatika.com
robotcowboy.com