In article <3e5fd86e@news.povray.org>,
 "Tom & Lu Melly" <all### [at] tomandlucouk> wrote:

> For example, the solution I gave involves vtransform from transforms.inc,
> but Will was trying to work something out with  vaxis_rotate - it would be
> hard for Will to intuit that vaxis_rotate was a built in function, and that
> vaxis_rotate was an include. I wouldn't know off-hand, and would have to
> check both sections, but the difference would be that I would know to check
> both.

Well, if he found vaxis_rotate() by looking through the documentation, 
vrotate() would be near by. There's no hint that vtransform() exists 
though, it might be a good idea to merge the documentation of built-in 
functions and the include files. A big reason for the layout of the 
include file documentation is that it was written separately from the 
manual, much later and by different people than those who did the 
function documentation, going file by file, and then grafted into the 
main documentation by yet another group of people. It's useful for 
finding out how to use something you know is in the include files, but 
you still have to read it or the include files to find out it exists.

The search feature helps, but only if you know what you're looking for. 
My best suggestion is to read through the entire manual. Not necessarily 
study it in depth, but page through it and get an idea for what is 
there. Some things can be hard to find even if you know exactly what to 
look for, but this helps a lot for most things.

The documentation does need a lot of reworking and reorganization, I was 
just pointing out that the include file names are not arbitrary. The 
additions in 3.5 were carefully thought out, and went through several 
possible organizations before reaching the one that was released. The 
others...well, there's a lot of crud that was only useful in earlier 
versions of POV, left over for backwards compatiblity, but it's pretty 
well arranged for the most part.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

Post a reply to this message