John Wright wrote:
>
> {laugh} Well Dave, we are here to entertain you. {grin}
[Justin and John both take a bow]
> Justin... sigh... I guess we all show the bias of our backgrounds.
[snip]
> It never occurred to me that anyone on this list wouldn't
> fully understand the issue.
You'd be surprised about how much programmers don't understand many
really fundamental things about computer programming. That is, they are
never taught (and probably rightly so) this like about how a for loop
gets converted to a set of CPU op-codes and then what those opcodes
might do in hardware (for example, how many programmers on this list
understand the concept of optimal path programming in 3D graphics?).
A simple example: Why is this loop
for(int i = count; --i >= 0 ; )
faster than this loop
for(int i = 0; i < count - 1; i++ )
given exactly the same loop content? Again, an illustrative concept that
most programmers would not be able to tell you about. This is more
prevalent in the younger generations of programmers that I deal with.
The older ones who've been doing it since the bare-metal days know many
more of these details as your case illustrates. The new programmers
understand data structures, regular expressions and how to hack together
some Java or Perl code to do stuff, but not the fundamentals. I'm lucky
in that I've done both sides of the fence (my elec eng thesis was in
hardware accelarated 3D graphics implementations). You don't get that
sort of approach in the far majority of the programmers today.
> Rendering"), but the issues that you mentioned and now claim as just for
> illustrative purposes tend to indicate that none of us know the exact
> algorithms used and that they might indeed vary from API to API and
> driver to driver.
Ah, I haven't changed the claim at all. If you read back in the first
email, I say "a very simplified algorithm is" and then at that point
"there are various approachs .... the simplest is ....". I know exactly
how the cards implement the rendering in hardware. However, to properly
explain it, I have to do a lot of very boring matrix/vector math which
would fill reams and reams of pages, quickly putting to sleep any
insomniacs on the list (not to mention, almost impossible to represent
in ascii text form). Its much easier and much more effective to make
some gross generalisations and a couple of big sweeping statements to
get the point across.
--
Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/
Freelance Java Consultant http://www.yumetech.com/
Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now.
Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism
processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with
all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..."
- Greg Bear, Slant
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