Does anyone know why POV-Ray documentation states the following?:

"Of the two, the quaternions are much better known, but one can argue that
hypercomplex numbers are more useful for our purposes, since complex valued
functions such as sin, cos, etc. can be generalized to work for
hypercomplex numbers in a uniform way."

Long ago, I took as an exercise to write a document about the way every
elementary function could be extended to Hamilton's quaternions, by
recalling my lessons of Linear Algebra and the fact that the set of complex

the sum of a diagonal and an antisymmetric one, and applying the same rule

study this matter, and even a recent thread about a bunch of macros to work
with quaternions provided trigonometric and exponential functions for them,
as well as their inverses. So why do quaternion fractals have to be
restricted to quadratic and cubic functions? I'm also wondering why there
seems to be no engine capable of rendering quaternion Mandelbrot sets...

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