Okay. But I don't see why something that is a rather obvious breach of style should be allowed to bully the rest of the application. I have never used Max/MSP, but it seems like its (and cyclone's) [pow~] is really something more like an [exp~] with a changeable base.

In my view -- this is an open-source program which is more or less guaranteed to evolve. If your patch breaks with a new version, use an older version, or find and fix the problems in the patch. To me it is a problem to avoid improvements to the language to maintain backward compatibility at all costs, and much better to throw warnings -- "Warning: your patch might be broken: look for all instances of pow~. Thank you." =o)

The best solution in any of these circumstances is the least worst solution. As far as I can tell the least worst solution is the one with the most patch-level control for the libraries. As a user I would rather do the research to see which externals I needed than to be forced into accepting one or the other, ESPECIALLY if vanilla classes are overwritten -- this seems the most egregious to me. Pd+libs and Pd-extended should support vanilla patching, since many users insist upon vanilla only -- worrying about cyclone and allowing vanilla to break seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse with regard to backward compatibility. Pd is not Max/MSP. Should you really have to import vanilla?

Thanks,