8.1. Computer Graphics

Computer graphics programming is a specialty within computer science, and it has its own journals and conferences and laboratories. It encompasses just about everything you can see on a computer, from the fonts with which letters are drawn (both on the screen, and when computer typeset and printed like this book), to elaborate images, animation, and the special effects in movies.

Computer graphics images are represented as data in the computer; they're usually organized in files, one per image, although they can also be stored in a computer program's memory, as I did when storing the graphics for the Restrictionmap.pm module in a scalar variable. Some kinds of animation store several images in one file, but I won't cover those kinds of image files here.