Glen Berry wrote:

> Someone has said that the braces in POV make it really clear and easy
> to understand. I say that closing tags, which are more specific than
> simple closing braces, are even more simple to sort out. When I see a
> closing brace, I have to back track and count braces to see what
> keyword that closing brace is associated with. If it were a closing
> TAG, then I would know immediately which keyword it was associated
> with. How many times have you wasted time chasing a missing closing
> brace, or perhaps had one brace too many? (Everyone has an occaisonal
> typo, everyone from Ken to Ron Parker.) It would be much quicker to
> find a missing or extraneous tag, because they are directly labeled as
> to *what* they are actually closing.

Then again there is nothing stopping you now from commenting your own code
to accomplish the same thing if clarity is what you seek. It would take
a little time to get used to idea but once you started to practice it you
would no longer have to worry about knowing which closing brace matched
which function. Must the program force you to use good code writing
practices ?

e.g.

  } // texture
 } // sphere
} intersection


 I will also raise one more major disadvantage of moving toward the
<----> tags you mention. It will break every single POV-Ray utility
and modelling program ever created because they have all been programmed
to use the curly brace for opening and closing functions. One cannot
presume that every utility author will take the time to adapt their
programs to this new syntax and in fact it would be unreasonable to
presume that they would want to or are even still around to do so.
I would call that a crippling blow to everyone who uses a modeller
or utility designed to work with the program.


P.S. Most people lose track of which brace closes what because they
     indent their code. Indented coding practices are evil and should
     be banned.

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1300+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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