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Hi folks,
the `prism` primitive currently supports, among others, cubic Bezier
spline outlines.
For certain technical reasons, I may need to add support for _quadratic_
Bezier splines at the render engine level as well, but it would be a
waste to not expose them to the scene description language (and, while
I'm at it, possibly also extend `lathe` accordingly).
An open question is, what keyword should be used for this type of spline?
For the records:
- Quadratic Bezier splines are a flavor of quadratic splines, aka 2nd
order polynomial splines.
- Quadratic splines are also occasionally referred to as "conic splines"
or "conic arcs", for reasons I'm not entirely sure of.
- `bezier_spline` is the current moniker for cubic Bezier splines.
- `quadratic_spline` is already in use for some quirky flavor of
quadratic spline that, in my mind, doesn't even deserve to live, but has
a long-standing tradition of existing under this moniker and therefore
isn't going anywhere in POV-Ray v3.x.
Here are some ideas:
- `quadratic_bezier_spline`, being the most accurate term.
- `conic_bezier_spline`, being a bit shorter.
- `conic_spline`, being yet shorter.
- `bezier2_spline`, the "2" referring to the polynomial order.
Personally, I'm somewhat unhappy with the very first for being rather
verbose, and the third for being prone to confusion with both
`cubic_spline` and `conic_sweep`, the latter being also used in `prism`.
I'm also not quite happy with the second one, because it's still
somewhat lengthy, and I think it isn't the most accurate of terms.
Thoughts, anyone?
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