Quote:Well, in truth, if I can get by with vectors and matrices then I won't bother with quaternions right away. A fourth dimension will just confuse me.

If 4 dimensions is confusing them 16 dimensional matrices should be hell for you.

Quote:Essentially, one could (with reasonable ease) right those three commands for themselves.

Yes you could write them yourself,

glRotate, glScale and glTranslate all create a matrix them premutiply the current matrix by that, setting the current matrix to the result of that calculation.

also you should read this: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MatrixMultiplication.html