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Operator Promotion

You may use a lone float expression to define a vector whose components are all the same. POV-Ray knows when it needs a vector of a particular type and will promote a float into a vector if need be. For example the POV-Ray scale statement requires a three component vector. If you specify scale 5 then POV-Ray interprets this as scale <5,5,5> which means you want to scale by 5 in every direction.

Versions of POV-Ray prior to 3.0 only allowed such use of a float as a vector in various limited places such as scale and turbulence. However you may now use this trick anywhere. For example...

 box{0,1}  // Same as box{<0,0,0>,<1,1,1>}

 sphere{0,1} // Same as sphere{<0,0,0>,1}

When promoting a float into a vector of 2, 3, 4 or 5 components, all components are set to the float value, however when promoting a vector of a lower number of components into a higher order vector, all remaining components are set to zero. For example if POV-Ray expects a 4D vector and you specify 9 the result is <9,9,9,9> but if you specify <7,6> the result is <7,6,0,0>.



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