Warp wrote:
> gimi <gim### [at] psicoch> wrote:
>>One more thing: Neither does it support conditional
>>structures like "#if ... #else ... #end" nor "(C ? A : B)",
>>AFAICS in the docs.
[And gimi also wrote:]
 >> So, One would have to workaround this using "select";
 >> now I understand why Christopher mentioned that..!
 >
>   It does. It's called 'select'. 'select' is not a workaround, it's a
> conditional structure.

Of course 'select' isn't a workaround in itself, but its
use as a conditional *structure*.  In a practical sense,
it is of course the same, but I would be careful not to
speak of a "structure" if it's in fact a function or
operator.  After all, there must be a reason why there
*are* conditional structures, and not just functions,
in programming languages!?

It is listed as a float function in the docs, and I
prefer to put it in the same drawer together with the
signum function, or even the '<=>' operator (Perl).

Or would you call "if ... then ... else" a function?

However, as far as POV-Ray is concerned, I don't know
how these different statements are implemented, nor if
it means anything whether it's called a function or
not...

>   In theory adding the support for recursive function calling should
> be easy (AFAIK you could simply remove the existing check which stops
> the parsing if recursion is detected). The problem is that there seems
> to be cases where it doesn't work ok, and fixing it to work always may
> need severe work. For simple recursive functions it should work ok (at
> least according to prototype tests).

I can't help getting the feeling that this POV-language
design or implementation is a little messy...

>   (I don't know if it would be a good idea to enable recursion in a patched
> version of povray because of the detected instability, but a personal
> version would be interesting to try.)

It certainly would!  OTOH, I think that this would better
be accompanied with some major redesign... - SCNR ;)


Have a nice weekend, I'm off...

gimi

-- 
"What right does Congress have to go around making laws
just because they deem it necessary?" -- Marion Barry
++++++++++++++++ http://www.psico.ch/ ++++++++++++++++

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