...Kilgard
Mark graduated with B.A. in Computer Science from Rice University and is a Member of the Technical Staff at Silicon Graphics. He can be reached by electronic mail addressed to mjk@sgi.com
...processor.
In principle, OpenGL's display list facility does support limited traversal, but OpenGL's display list functionality is not a general-purpose traversal facility.
...tasks.
In practice, some graphics hardware does have specialized software known as micro-code.
...[#akeley89##1#].
Akeley's original taxonomy described in [1] referred to the rasterization stage as scan conversion.
...RGBA
Red, green, blue, and alpha.
...values.
Four clip ID planes would provide 16 possible clip values, but one clip value is reserved for the screen region not assigned to any particular clip ID assigned window, leaving only 15 clip values assignable.
...clips,
With the X Window System's Shape extension, arbitrarily shaped windows are easy to create, but even in a window system that only supports rectangualar windows, complex overlappings can still define arbitrary clips so the case of arbitrary clips must be addressed.
...unconnected,
Rendering N unconnected lines requires 13#13 vertices; rendering connected lines means each line starts where the last one ended so only N + 1 vertices are required. Rendering connected lines requires half the per-vertex bandwidth of unconnected lines.

mjk@sgi.com