...the circle is trivially easy to compute.

Quite on the contrary, I'd say that it is the bounding box which is trivially easy to compute, whereas the circle is rather straightforward but still needs quite a couple of floating point operations. Both are linear with the number of points, but you just need to write down the subs for both algorithms for a triangle and you'll easily spot the difference.

Regarding performance, I guess that floating point operations are slow compared to if/then/else branching.

In reply to Re^6: searching polygons not merged by haj
in thread searching polygons not merged by dideod.yang

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