From: "Morgan L. Owens" Sent: Saturday, May 25, 2002 10:27 AM
To be honest, that larger one is actually known to be broken [...] To confess further, I've found situations where the original four-circle code fails to ensure proper tangency.
I sincerely hope you didn't interprete my quip about your pars trying to beat Mathematica as some form of ironic critique. [...]
myself wishing I could use arrays and nested loops. And a debugger.
How often I've been sitting in front of the monitor testing a formula way simpler than these - totally frustrated. ("I don't get it! Look what it's doing *now*!")
Some earlier attempts of mine broke Fractint. "Too many jumps" it said...
To tell the truth, the last time I pushed the parser's limits was when it allowed no more than 250 instructions and got a "formula to big" regularly when the maximum was 80...
And one more confession. I could have made them twice as fast, and my own personal copies do. The problem is that they achieve their speedup by means of a hack that relies on something which I consider to be a bug (or rather, enhancement opportunity) in the Fractint formula parser.
The "bug" is that values computed for one pixel are still retained when the next pixel is calculated.
I feel a bit uneasy about using a program's undocumented features. In case things are changed in a future version...
The Opportunity. The above is a dirty hack. One should instead have a per-image initialisation section in Fractint formulae just as there is now for per-pixel initialisation.
Yes. That's definitely missing. On the other hand: Considering how Fractint evolved - changes and extensions by many different authors submitted over the years - it's no wonder the program has its idiosyncrasies. Still,the implementation of the formula parser was pivotal IMHO (I, at least, wouldn't have used it to such an extent without it). And I'm not sure you would see such *extensive* scripting capabilities in some modern fractal renderers without Fractint existing. Regards, Gerald