POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : Q: dot operators : Re: dot operators Server Time
13 Aug 2024 03:18:17 EDT (-0400)
  Re: dot operators  
From: Ron Parker
Date: 18 Nov 1998 08:18:28
Message: <3652c924.0@news.povray.org>
On 17 Nov 1998 19:45:49 -0500, Rich Lafferty <ric### [at] vax2concordiaca> wrote:
>Abstracting further:
>
>Is a #define just macro substitution, like in C, or is it an
>actual assignment operator?

It's an actual assignment operator.  POV parses whatever comes
after the #declare (not #define) and stores the binary result
of the parsing (i.e. an actual object, not a bit of text) in 
a chunk of memory referenced by an entry in the symbol table.  
When you use the #declared thing, POV copies this binary image 
and puts the copy into your scene, with any modifications you 
specify.

However, this doesn't actually have anything to do with the 
original question.  The stated behavior _could_ be implemented,
it just hasn't been.  Since it's just syntactic sugar and could
be accomplished other ways, I see no reason to implement it
except perhaps for parallelism with C.


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