Curious Symbol Structure

[Bill Thoen]

I'm trying to learn the MapServer lore and now I'm focusing on symbols. Can
anyone tell me what the logic is where one is defining a _line_ style by
using a TYPE of ELLIPSE (instead of LINE) and POINTS definition of one (x
y) as in the symbol definition below? (This is from
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/reference/symbology/examples).

SYMBOL
  NAME 'dashed1'
  TYPE ELLIPSE
  POINTS 1 1 END
  FILLED true
  STYLE 10 5 5 10 END
END

I'm just curious. This seems like some historical artifact from the days
when learning MapServer was hard. ;-)

The TYPE ELLIPSE seems especially weird to me. Why not TYPE LINE?

- Bill Thoen