"Ronald L. Parker" wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 10 Jan 1999 13:59:25 +0100, Spider <spi### [at] bahnhofse> wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> >"Ronald L. Parker" wrote:
> >> You
> >> could write an entire virtual machine and make the 'libraries' contain
> >> p-code, but there would be a bit of a performance hit over just
> >> compiling the functions into the source directly.
> >Did I hear a JAVA whisper here, and a sob about the loss of Speed?
> 
> Only if you naively think VM==JAVA.  There have been bytecode compiled
> machines around for decades. One such was UCSD Pascal.  Perl, too,
> worked like this until the most recent version.  Java doesn't really
> offer anything new in the arena of cross-platform operation, except
> for the standardized interfaces in places like the AWT, and even that
> is debatable with things like Tcl/Tk (and to a lesser extent Perl/Tk)
No, I'm not that naive... 
Java came to my mind after the decision to drop it from POV (see original post)
As for the other examples, some of them are new to me(most) since I'm not a *nixer..

> 
> Be that as it may, it's actually not a bad idea, and I've been tossing
> it around in the back of my head for a while now.  For the isosurface
> stuff, at least, most of the work has already been done.  It's just a
> matter of extending the existing formula mechanisms to handle looping
> and conditionals, but I know from experience that extending those
> mechanisms is not for the fainthearted.
I think it would be easies to implement it in the POV main source...
I can't tell, since I haven't looked at the source.

> 
> The same principle applies to using Renderman-compliant shaders in
> POV-Ray.  Again, you'd use a bytecode method (perhaps with a JIT
> compiler on some platforms).  But again, you'd hardly use the Java VM.
> It's designed to run Java, and it runs applications written in other
> languages with less alacrity due to its choice of atomic operations.
Ok.
Thanks for the hard coding information..
Been a while since I thought about it...

//Spider

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