pdstring v0.05

 + added persistent string buffer to any2string
 + added initial buffer size and eos-character arguments to any2string, string2any
    - defaults are backwards-compatible but ugly
 + added --enable-object-externals option to configure

svn path=/trunk/externals/moocow/pdstring/; revision=8247

1 files changed, 45 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/README.txt b/README.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b715526
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.txt
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+    README for pd external package 'pdstring'
+
+    Last updated for pdstring v0.02
+
+DESCRIPTION
+    The 'pdstring' package contains objects for converting to and from
+    (ASCII)-strings, represented as lists of floats.
+
+INSTALLATION
+    Issue the following commands to the shell:
+
+       cd PACKAGE-XX.YY  (or wherever you extracted the distribution)
+       ./configure
+       make
+       make install
+
+BUILD OPTIONS
+    The 'configure' script supports the following options, among others:
+
+    * --enable-debug , --disable-debug
+        Whether to enable verbose debugging messages. Default=no.
+
+ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
+    PD by Miller Puckette and others.
+
+    Ideas, black magic, and other nuggets of information drawn from code by
+    Guenter Geiger, Larry Troxler, and iohannes m zmoelnig.
+
+KNOWN BUGS
+  Memory Usage
+    Encoding each byte of a string as its own float is shamefully wasteful:
+    it uses only 1 byte out of at least 3 which could be losslessly used
+    given ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985 floats, not to mention the remaining
+    byte(s) (usually 1) of the float itself or the (usually 4) bytes used
+    for the a_type flag. Unfortunately, Pd trims some floating point
+    precision in message boxes and in float atoms, so a truly lossless float
+    encoding for Pd would only be possible using 2 bytes per float (wasting
+    1/2 the space of the float itself), and (to me), the memory saving such
+    an encoding would provide is just not worth the lack of transparency and
+    additional workload it would involve (but contact me if you want the
+    code anyways).
+
+AUTHOR
+    Bryan Jurish <moocow@ling.uni-potsdam.de>
+