3D Math Data structures/SIMD

[Bill Baxter]

Janice Caron wrote:
> 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.

I believe the previous thread on providing support for these harware 
entities suggested names like float3 and float4.  That seems good to me 
in that it doesn't explicitly promise to support any particular 
mathematical convention.

--bb