In article <419a5b55$1@news.povray.org> , Florian Brucker 
<tor### [at] torfboldcom>  wrote:

> I'm of course very interested in feedback from the community. So if
> you've got critcism, suggestions, spotted typos, etc. I'd like to know
> about it.

For now, four things:

* Great idea and good work!

* In the hardware section, don't make "graphic cards" bold, but "You don't
even need a graphic card to raytrace" because later on you mark bold what is
needed, and a reader only scanning the text could misunderstand that
paragraph.

* Question: On which platform did you measure the streams? I am wondering
because they are much faster than I would have expected.

* The thread about functions you link to contains some wrong information.
The author sin/cos evaluated constant expressions assuming that would make
the function faster.  This is not necessary, the function compiler is able
to evaluate constant (sub-)expressions automatically.  Currently (as of
3.6.1) the only exception to this are when the constant expression is a
user-defined function (thus what the user declared as "function { ... }") or
a functions that take more than one argument (except "pow", which is
optimised).  As such, the functions min, max, select and atan2 are not
optimised if they represent a constant expression.  However, it is likely
that in the future (with only a dot-dot version change, i.e. in 3.6.4 or so)
even these functions will be evaluated if they are a constant expression.
The only reason it is not currently done is lack of time to implement what
is needed to do it.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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