In article <39AB5302.A39A21D7@faricy.net> , David Fontaine 
<dav### [at] faricynet>  wrote:

> When POV parses, does it directly parse the text file? If so, perhaps it
> could load a compressed version into memory: replace keywords with
> binary code, so no tedious text searching slows down a big parse; when
> using loops and such, give #end statements an address refering to the
> beginning, etc

POV-Ray already does what you are suggesting.  in general, your suggestions
are necessary to get any working parser.  POV-Ray does not do massive string
searches, there are much better ways of finding them and they don't require
a binary file format or something.

> For all I know, POV could already do this, but I know text parses much
> slower than binary...

No, the reason for the slow parsing of POV-Ray scenes are mostly related to
memory allocation.  Please note that this topic has been discussed for an
endless time before, just go back far enough in either povray.general or
povray.programming .

> Perhaps it is asking too much...

Why this remark?

> Also, perhaps, different variable types. I don't know how many times
> I've stored integers between 0 and 10 in an array of doubles...

What is wrong with this in POV-Ray, it will store the integers in the array
just fine?  And they should also work just like any other numbers, after
all, "real" math doesn't really make a difference between 'doubles' and
'integers' either (for the functions POV-Ray offers).


     Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

Post a reply to this message