In article <39ad99dd@news.povray.org>, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> 
wrote:

>   The most efficient way of storing numbers (integers and floats) is to
> write their byte values in memory directly to the file as raw binary 
> data.
> In this way they will take the least space and they can be read very fast
> (you don't have to parse it, you just read that binary data directly into
> the memory location that represents your variable).
...snip...

This only applies to *saving* the byte code data. And as you mentioned, 
it is possible to save/read the data on platforms of both endianness. 
While this is slower, it isn't as slow as reading ASCII.
But this doesn't really matter, since you don't need to save the byte 
code to a file that will go to another system. At most, a temporary file 
will be needed. Most or all of it can reside in RAM, and be processed 
much faster than POV can parse now. Since you can always use the 
original source file, there isn't any need for the byte codes to be 
saved to their own format.


> : What about control aids? They would process much faster in byte-code.

What are "control aids"?


>   I don't know how isosurface functions are implemented in megapov, but I
> wouldn't be surprised if they were converted to byte-code (which uses
> stack arithmetic) which is interpreted while rendering. And we all know
> how fast isosurfaces are (they are incredibly fast).
>   Someone who knows could tell us how it is done.

I think the isosurface functions do use byte codes or a similar 
technique. I don't understand either one of them well enough to say for 
sure, though.
And I wouldn't call them "incredibly fast"...well, if you compare them 
to the POV-Script parser...and they are surprisingly fast. Just not 
"incredibly" fast. :-)

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

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