Clearly the left input is y -- if it were x, then the output would be 0 -- so it should say "(y, x)" pair...? Right?

hjh

@ddw_music Yup.
I still use Pd extended help when possible...... a lot of work was done back then to get it right.
David.

@whale-av I wonder, why "they" dont add those corrections to PD vanilla?

@porres Did this make it into your documentation branch?

hjh

@Jona No idea of the real reason.
I find the help format for extended to be well thought through but there seems to be resistance to the PDDP project being used as a basis for a new help system.
Trawling for errors and differences now would be a pretty huge task, and I get the impression that Pd had more manpower available when extended was put together.
It could be done piecemeal though as errors are discovered and revealed (as in this thread and others).
Maybe just a part of the Vanilla Good Extended Bad culture...... which I understand totally except in respect of the documentation.
David.

@ddw_music said:

@porres Did this make it into your documentation branch?

Sorry I missed this. I've only recently started tracking this forum more closely. So, to answer you, no, this did not make it into my docs revision. I mean, I revised this help file of course, but didn't have a problem with it.

You could have opened an issue on github or something the https://github.com/pure-data/pddp repository was created just a bit over 3 years ago (nov 24th 2021). This post is "3 years old" but there is no precise date, so not sure if you knew it by then... and well, here it is for everyone to know about it in any case.

@Jona said:

@whale-av I wonder, why "they" dont add those corrections to PD vanilla?

well, who's "they"?

The Pd-extended project was simply an independent development on a fork of Pd and the whole documentation did include particularities of its own, meaning that it referenced to other objects and things that were particular to Pd extended, so not that easy and simple to apply and adopt. Also, in some cases, I found issues and things that were not really accurate, arguably wrong in the Pd-extended docs.

I don't really know what was happening or how it happened as I wasn't that involved back then. I'm curious to know but not that curious to investigate, search the list archives and stuff. But I can make assumptions.

Maybe no one really just bothered in helping with and collaborating to the Pd docs. And I say that because at one point I just started making lots of changes and contributions to the Pd Vanilla docs and there was simply no discussion or resistance. I eventually started getting more comfortable in changing more and more things and was simply trusted and, well, after many many years I basically rewrote the thing and have been working on a manual overhaul this year and whatnot.

I kept hearing people complaining about the Pd docs, and saying how the Extended documentation was so much better. This kept going on after extended simply died and there were forks based on it... and... well... I just decided to do things, take actions, instead of wondering around

So, why weren't "they" doing things? There was no "they"... there weren't just people actually getting involved to collaborate.

Instead of "they", there's always been "we"... this is open source and a community based project. Somehow actions got fragmented into independent efforts, not well coordinated, sometime conflicts did arise. Funny enough, many of the people in this community did not realize they were or could be a part of it and internalized the paradigm of just being "users", while "developers" were anonymous god like entities that were seemingly on another spiritual plane that we could not communicate to and just wonder about how and why "they" did or did not do things

Or maybe, somehow, people incorporate the non open source mentality, where "we" are users and "they" are the unknown paid workers that are working on the company that develops the software.

I did promote a documentation overhaul and posted about it in many channels, asked for collaborations. Anyone (really, anyone!) can do things, propose changes and improvements to the docs... it's open source folks. I haven't been doing it "all by myself". We often discuss how to document some things, it's gotten a little better, but I'm mostly doing this alone, by myself, and pushing it. Practically nobody came up to join me and collaborate and help with the documentation overhaul...

So... that is to say I will see about adding more details to [atan2] and would love to hear actual suggestions about how WE should do it

cheers

Well, from the help patch of [atan2] in Extended we have this in [pd atan2_vs_atan]....

To the best of my knowledge, this is just wrong and I did mention I saw many wrong things in the extended docs, well, hey, this is one number results simply do not match..., it's good "they" simply did not adopt this

also, to make it clearer, docs usually reffered to other externals, not part of vanilla, and they all came with this [pddplink] external object, so it wasn't possible to just take it... there had to be some work involved and I also wonder why "they who did the changes and made a parallel pd-extended documentation" did not try to actually collaborate to the Vanilla docs...

The pd extended docs do mention "them".... and I quote

"HELP_PATCH_AUTHORS This help patch was updated for Pd version 0.35 test 28 by Dave Sabine as part of a project called pddp proposed by Krzysztof Czaja to build comprehensive documentation for Pd. Jonathan Wilkes revised the patch to conform to the PDDP template for Pd version 0.42."

Again, I was no part of "pddp" and the "pddp" thing got revived, brought back to life and now I do focus on it and work on it a lot, but it's something for Vanilla now, really.

well, hey, I'm not a math expert.... I don't really know what happened and I can't run extended in my apple silicon to test if it worked back then... I don;t know why such a crude mistake happened of it really didn't happen for some reason.

It's unlikely to me that [atan2] did behave differently in extended or that it changed and broke backwards compatibility in Vanilla... but I tried this and this does work...

but yeah, I know little, but I also seem to remember [atan2] was actually necessary and not able to be built in another way... I remembered some results could not match depending if they were negative or positive, so this does not match

In any case, I don't think the help file should be a place to teach math for those who don't know it. I also don't see a reason why to show a more complicated patch (wether it works or not) that shows how to implement an object. This is also not a job for the help file... it must simply just reasonably explain what the object does... how it works and operates...