Patrick Elliott <sha### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Why not also limit color output to 8-bit?

  So you did not read the 3.6 documentation?

  Besides, the patches over patches over patches technology of the
current POV-Ray has more or less come to an end. A patch is seldom
a good solution to anything (except features which can't be done
in any other way, but this is not such a feature), and adding more
and more patches to POV-Ray is only making worse the problem which
is currently overwhelming it.

  When suggesting a new feature, think first if it's *really* necessary
to implement as a patch (eg. because of speed and/or memory issues),
or if it could be done as a script (assuming POV-Ray had a powerful
scripting language). Most patches written in C++ will probably die
with POV-Ray 4 because they will then be possible to be implemented
with the scripting language instead.

  Patches are only good for one thing: Speed. Basically everything else
in a patch is a burden: Patches are rigid (their feature set is usually
limited and fixed), not easily modifiable and they add potential bugs
and maintenance nightmares to the source code.
  "Plugins" made with a powerful scripting language have many advantages:
They can be made versatile and easily modifiable (without having to
recompile anything) and they do not introduce bugs nor maintenance
problems to the POV-Ray source code. In fact, quite many of the current
features in POV-Ray could be removed from the source code and implemented
as scripts.

  Of course POV-Ray 4 is in the very distant future and for now patches
are usually the only way to go. However, you have to be aware that
patches are usually not the answer in the long run.

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

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