In article <3d999f1b$1@news.povray.org> , "Vadim Sytnikov" <syt### [at] rucom>
wrote:

> If you do believe some/all of my points are not valid, I would be glad to
> hear from you. But PLEASE be more specific and less personal.

Let me explain this first.  I do not and cannot know what you know or don't
know.  I can only judge from what I see here.  And that is simple.  There is
a list of known problem as <http://www.povray.org/download/3.5-bugs.php>.  I
can tell that you have done nothing to fix any of those bugs and contribute
those fixes anywhere, so your contribution to the POV-Ray source code is
zero.  There is nothing wrong with that, what you do with your free time is
your business.

However, if a discussion, rather then focusing on what really needs to be
fixed starts to go into "this code is no good and that code is no good and I
don't like this and I don't like that" and you waste time making it look
like you like it, well, then you are definitely concentrating on the *wrong*
aspect of programming and contributing to POV-Ray.  What you do in your code
is your business, but maybe it occurred to you that bringing POV-Ray to you
requires some understanding of programming and I think all POV-Ray team
members have proven the ability to make a cross-platform application.

Then someone comes along and tells us what we should have done.  Now, what
do you say if someone goes along your code, without actually looking into
for what it does and what it is not even supposed to do and starts
complaining despite there being no real problem.

It is always easy to complain; it is much harder to create something.

> I am becoming increasingly upset with you attiude towards other programmers.
> "Ignorance", "broken compilers", etc. is all I hear most of the time. I have
> been professionally programming for more than 12 years, and have developed 2
> commercial compilers among other stuff. So the word "ignorance" is not what
> I would like to hear in a responce to a viable suggestion.

Well, I had explained for what the multicharacter constants are being used,
and if you had bothered to read the thread or check the source code you
would have known that your argument simply misses the point completely.

> Wake up, Thorsten. You're part of the POV-Ray community, but you're starting
> to ignore all but the most trivial inputs. And this starts to worry me a
> lot, since the POV-Ray is seamingly completely in your hands.

Well, why should I fix something that is not broken when there is a list of
things that are broken.  With your attitude of development we would still be
at POV-Ray 0.1 or be releasing buggy software with well-looking code.

Neither is reasonable.  It is not my responsibility to defend anything in
the POV-Ray source code unless you can show that in the way it *is* used
will not work.  And there have been such problems like the "long" in the
octree float trick code that really was not portable.

I do not care for the tons of hypothetical or impractical or already known
to be wrong examples given in the whole thread of discussion.

Oh, and as a matter of fact, multicharacter character codes have worked fine
on Macs since 1984.  And they work well elsewhere, even Windows!  So you
obviously have no broad foundation of experience with cross-platform code.
You claim that what is used in millions of programs is not possible.  How
could I possibly take you serious given this fact?

> I can reword my point this way: if you use multi-character constants, then
> integer value of the constant depends upon BOTH character values and
> endianness of the target machine.

Well, I have been saying it is implementation defined all along.  So I am
not sure why you repeat it.

I can reword my point this way:  If you want to teach people what you think
is good coding style, feel free to do so, but don't dare to teach me _your_
coding style on _my_ turf ;-)


So can we end this endless and useless complaining now and get back to
fixing real problems...?


    Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

Post a reply to this message