3D Math Data structures/SIMD

[Janice Caron]

On 12/22/07, Lukas Pinkowski <Lukas.Pinkowski at web.de> wrote:

> No it's not rare; the shading languages aren't limited to computer graphics,
> but are used for programming highly parallel hardware (= GPU) also. Please
> google for GPGPU. It would be a surprise to many people if '*' didn't mean
> elementwise multiplication.

Done. Having read up on it, I now withdraw all of my objections ... except one.

If there's hardware support of three-element arrays and four-element
arrays, then I see no reason why they can't be considered primitive
types. You've convinced me, and you've got my vote.

My one objection (which of course was not one of your proposals in the
first place, merely my misunderstanding), is that I don't want these
things to be called "vectors". I'd like to see that term reserved for
the true mathematical entities. Call them whatever you want - I don't
care - just not "vector", and my complaints will disappear.


> After all: Walter has brainwashed us to believe 'imaginary real' to be
> imaginary 80bit IEEE floating point numbers on x87. ;-)

I'm sure you know as well as I that many of us, myself included, are
not happy with that nonclamenture. We may unfortunately be stuck with
it, but one example of bad naming does not justify another.