Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!pcg
From: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: In computing, late-bloomers are usually never-bloomers
Summary: Algorithms can also be never-bloomers...
Message-ID: <1551@aber-cs.UUCP>
Date: 21 Dec 89 20:22:20 GMT
Reply-To: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)
Organization: Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth
	(Disclaimer: my statements are purely personal)
Lines: 23

In article <1989Dec21.013530.2455@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us> johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine) writes:
    
    It was the same issue with Brezenham's classic article about how to draw a
    straight line on a raster device, a pen plotter attached to a 1620.  There
    is some extra cruft in the presentation of the method because he wanted to
    avoid an integer division by two which was very slow.

A thought that surely has architectural implications: there is another
algorithm to rasterize lines, that is based on algebra and grammars. The idea
is that the line to draw is really made up of one section repeated over and
over, you just calculate this section and then copy it again and again. It
does not do this by making (albeit simple) decisions at every point to draw.
The algorithm was published, apparently around the same time as Brezenham's,
by a Belgian mathematician.

Guess what, it has never bloomed. Very few graphics people even know about
it, as it was a nice result of algebraic theory. Will it bloom? It is easy
to see that (especially important with the increasing resolution of modern
devices) it can be much faster than Bresenham's.
-- 
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk