In article  <3d0af371@news.povray.org>, "Thorsten Froehlich" 
<tho### [at] trfde> wrote:


> (snip)
> As the feature is redundant anyway and was only a 3.5 beta addition ...
> (snip)

yeah, it is redundant, but I think "something^another" is easier to write
and read than "pow( something, another )". AND it is difficult to search and
replace that ;)

I understand that most of the discussion was about operator precedence,
which I thought odd from the beginning on, but of course there always are
people with different opinions ...

>
> There was no old behavior.

Sorry, but that's wrong! 3.1g (mac) at least did return <0,0,0> and no error
message - and this is, though mathematically definitely incorrect, quite
useful in many cases. And some include files from other people, like
TORSPLINE or CHEAP_SWEEP suddenly don't work as before :(

> There never was a legal result being returned for a zero length vector and the
> documentation clearly stated it.

Sorry, but no, it didn't ! It does so with all 3.5 betas, but not with 3.1g.

> You cannot normalize a zero length vector, it is undefined and always was.

Correct from a strictly mathematical point of view, but - as pointed out
above - a function that does return the normalized vector if possible and
<0,0,0> if not IS useful ...

> The problem was that the parser didn't catch this...
>
Shame :)

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to make anybody angry or step on someone's
toes, but I think you ( the team ) are behaving a bit inconsistently here :)
With vnormalize, you refer to strict mathematical reasons and ignore
discussion, with "^" you "fear" (sorry) discussion and throw it out instead
of simply DEFINING the way that operator behaves in POV-SDL ...

Well, that's the way it is, and it probably will not change again ;)

CU

Karl

--
The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
(H.Ellison)

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