"omniverse" <omn### [at] charternet> wrote:
> "Anthony D. Baye" <Sha### [at] spamnomorehotmailcom> wrote:
> > f_helix1(x,y,z,n,p,r,R,s,c,a)
> > supposedly, the fifth parameter is the period, or "Number of turns per unit
> > length".
> >
> > The way I read this is that, for every unit the helix object rises, it should
> > make one complete turn.  This is obviously not the case.
>
> Anthony, I can confirm same here.
>
> Slightly different wording found in the Insert menu, Special shapes|Isosurfaces
> by function.inc and placing the Isosurface f_helix into a scene file, so I went
> looking for the source code after realizing it was essentially saying the number
> of turns is based on a complete circle. Meaning if you apply that 2*pi to your
> number of turns you should get what you expected. I checked this and seemed to
> work.
>
> Source code makes very little sense to me, although a coding math wizard
> probably could get the 2*pi introduced into there somehow.
>
The source makes very little sense, period.  I tried tracing the path for the
command line options to find out the answer for another question, and I couldn't
figure out where anything was handled.

I found references to several apparently different functions called "trace" but
nowhere could I find definitions or forward declarations for them. (I downloaded
the zip of the master and went through it using grep)

It would make more sense -to me, at least- for command line parsing to be more
centralized, with options and their values stored in a dictionary that could be
queried by various modules, but that's just my opinion.  It may be that there
would be some undesirable overhead in that method, but it would seem to me that
maintainability would win out.

At any rate, it makes no sense for the period of a helix to be based on length
of the curve.  Could something have gotten mixed up between this and the
toroidal form?

Regards,
A.D.B.

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