>> Which begs the question: Would it be worth to use this approximation -
>> maybe with a few more steps of newton - in POV-Ray, or at least in an
>> experimental patch thereof?
>
>
> If you consider that:
>   1. POV-Ray has currently no requirement on using IEEE-754 float (of
> exactly 32 bits)
>   2. The FLOAT & other types of POV-Ray are customisable
>
> such approximation would impact:
>   * portability (you now MUST have 32 bits floats, nothing else)
>   * precision or speed (if you need newton steps... )
>   * as black-box magic, it would be a hell to debug if you ever get a
> typo on one digit.

It would be interesting to see how much it affected the speed first. If 
it was some significant speed-up with no visible loss in image accuracy 
then I suspect many people would be happy to install a custom/patched 
version to make use of the speed-up.

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