In article <slr### [at] fwicom>, ron### [at] povrayorg 
wrote:

> Be careful.  There are some gotchas with identifiers that I just found 
> whilst gallivanting through the code.

Anything in particular? I've been following the code for the spline {} 
patch, and my interpolated transformations seem to be declaring fine...I 
haven't tested them with macros or arrays, though. And I've noticed that 
my #set patch doesn't work for arrays.


> >problem is that the "pattern" keyword is already used, but it's current 
> This doesn't preclude your reusing it in a different context.

I know, it just bothers me that the same keyword, with a very specific 
meaning, is used for widely different things. And the "pattern" keyword 
just doesn't seem to fit in this case.


> Originally it was to have taken a pattern as argument.  I don't remember
> now why it wasn't written to do so, but I suspect it had something to do
> with transforms and other warps not being usable at that level, or with
> things like pigment_map and average that aren't strictly patterns.  Maybe
> I should keep a diary of these things.

Well, pigments have colors...but I don't recall if this "image" type can 
be used outside height fields (and I can't think of any reason you 
*would* use it directly...). With pigments, you can drastically modify 
the shape of the surface by using different color_maps, and while you 
can do the same now with ordinary patterns using the spline_wave patch, 
it wasn't around then. Similar to the reason pigments are useable as 
isosurface functions, but patterns aren't.
Well, there is also the fact that patterns can't be declared... ;-)


> Better might be to just get rid of it altogether, since there are now 
> lots of better ways of doing most of what it can do. 

There are? The only way I can think of would be to write a macro that 
uses eval_pigment() to create a mesh...and that's only for height fields.


> Not likely to happen now, though, for hysterical raisins.

If it *is* modified or removed, it should be now, before there are 
enough "hysterical raisins". I doubt there is anyone who has used it who 
wasn't aware that it is an experimental feature of an unofficial version.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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