There are things that are worth abstracting, and things that aren't.
Writing a function that returns pi in case its value changes someday
is the extreme example. This isn't quite in that category, but it's
closer to that than to, say, the gravitational acceleration.
Here's my real objection -- you're asking for adding a special-purpose
function to the LSL namespace that returns one value that's unlikely
to change. Granted, on other platforms like OpenSim, it may well
change (although as Doug said, it's also baked into our protocols, so
it's not quite so easily changed as one might think). Designing for
every future possibility has a name -- overdesign -- and it can be the
death of projects as people try to keep up with all the things they
thought they might need someday.
With that said, though, I think there could be a reasonable middle
ground: something like llGetWorldConstant(int identifier) where you
can look up values of certain world constants, like gravity, direction
of gravity, size of sim, coordinate of the center of the sim, and so
forth. We'd want to define a namespace for the constants -- similar to
the way OpenGL has GL constants -- so that developers of compatible
platforms could have their own specific constants, there could be
standard values implemented by all, and a place for proposed future
standards.
I would be prepared to support a well-developed proposal for such a
function (provided it also included a proposal for how to manage the
namespace of constants). I still don't think I'd support a specific
function for this particular issue.
Q
On Oct 31, 2008, at 8:15 AM, Argent Stonecutter wrote:
Likely or not, a routine that simply returns the vector
"<256,256,4096>" right now seems to be a cheap way of making it
possible for you to change your mind in the future.
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