Compiling it wont do you any good, as the source they've provided is just the raw classes for working with ptex files. You'll have to link to it from your shader/tool and use the classes there for it to do anything. Incidently 3delight doesn't seem to recognize the file format so that sucks. I guess they haven't got around to supporting it yet (if at all)

Quote - so it's intended for animating lo-res figures and not for NVITWS still renders?
quads-only.  one of the power-point slides actually asked if they had 3-sided polys,
should they subdivide it with quads or hexagns?  like squaring the triangle.

Seems to be that way, yes. Though frankly for stills you don't really need something like renderman in the first place. Most of the benefits of that tech lie in animation.