Abstract :
Geometry plays a crucial role in nearly all design and production activities in the discrete goods industries. Curiously, these industries´ primary means for specifying geometry—two-dimensional graphics—has not changed significantly for more than a century. Dramatic changes are likely to occur in the next decade, however, because the deficiencies of current methods are retarding the progress of automation and are stimulating the development of new, computationally oriented schemes for handling mechanical geometry.
