Q: Are CARDINAL and HERMITE identical? Notational?

The manuals offer scant information on curve functions, but they say about CARDINAL:

> where c is the tension parameter, which is a constant that modifies the length of the tangent. This
parameter is not specified separately in COLLADA 1.4 and is instead baked into the tangents that are
provided by the OUT_TANGENT and IN_TANGENT inputs to the sampler.

There is a matrix based formulation below, but it seems academic, since it's not defined in COLLADA's stated terms.

If the tension is "baked in" (note elsewhere it's suggested that IN/OUT_TANGENT is only used by BEZIER and HERMITE but here it's expressly used with CARDINAL) and CARDINAL is a cubic Hermite spline, and HERMITE is a cubic Hermite spline, then it stands to reason that CARDINAL is HERMITE and the distinction only communicates to editing tools that they can reconstruct the tension-constant from the data??

In which case, if the tension-constant is also in the HERMITE data would be an interesting question I suppose.

Review the COLLADA 1.4 manual passages on CARDINAL, HERMITE, IN_TANGENT, and OUT_TANGENT, then compare their stated definitions and matrix formulations. Done means producing a clear, specification-backed explanation of whether CARDINAL and HERMITE are identical and how tension is represented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.