=pod

README for pd external package 'pdstring'

Last updated for pdstring v0.06

=head1 DESCRIPTION

The 'pdstring' package contains objects for converting to and
from (ASCII)-strings, represented as lists of floats.

=head1 INSTALLATION

Issue the following commands to the shell:

   cd PACKAGE-XX.YY  (or wherever you extracted the distribution)
   ./configure
   make
   make install

=head1 BUILD OPTIONS

The 'configure' script supports the following options, among others:

=over 4

=item * --help

Output a brief usage summary of the 'configure' script,
including a list of supported options and influential
environment variables.

=item * --enable-debug , --disable-debug

Whether to enable verbose debugging messages.
Default=no.

=back

=head1 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.

=head1 KNOWN BUGS

=head2 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).


=head1 AUTHOR

Bryan Jurish E<lt>moocow@ling.uni-potsdam.deE<gt>