Philippe Lhoste wrote:
> 
> [...]
> Among numerous ideas:
> - To give a model without revealing some tricks used to make it. [...]
> - To ease the creation of PoV-Ray to other 3D formats converters. [...]
> - In the same spirit, to ease the creation of PoV-Ray pre-viewers, [...]

To give my 2 cents concerning this:

Neither of the arguments cited above is really a good argument for a
binary file format:

- You can easily add file writing routines to your sophisticated
build-whatever-macro and thereby avoid revealing your algorithms.  In fact
quite a few include files available (like the HF macros in 'shapes.inc')
have such functions already built in.

- The binary format would be really complicated (not comparable to png,
tiff, etc. at all) so writing converters would not be much easier than
writing them for the text format.

Christoph

-- 
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