In article <3a1a3c21@news.povray.org>, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> 
wrote:

>   Why should the user optimize by hand when povray could do it 
>   automatically?

Because it can't be done automatically without breaking certain things 
or leading to odd behavior that isn't intuitive from reading the code...


>   Avoiding a feature only because you CAN make obfuscated code with it is
> not a good principle.

I did not say that. I meant that the fact that you can make obfuscated 
code with it is not a good reason to add it. It was intended as a joke, 
because you seem to like doing that kind of thing. :-)


>   If povray can optimize the speed of the parsing, that's only a good 
>   thing.

Not if it complicates things unnecessarily. If a user puts a call to a 
macro with a side effect in the code, he will expect the macro to be 
called. Note: users are not always programmers or software designers, 
don't expect them to always avoid something that is "bad style". They 
just want things to do what they are told. The error caused when this 
optimization is done to a macro with a side effect is one that would be 
extremely difficult to track down unless you already know where to look 
for it.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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