Ray Gardener wrote:
> 
> Cool. Speaking of 4.0, are there any notes
> describing what changes are planned and
> how they will be approached?

The only real public information so far is the transistion from C to
C++. There was talk of a more open development model for 4.0 but I
know little of the details or when it is supposed to happen, if at
all. The POV-Team is still in the process of finalizing the release
of v3.51 so 4.0 is kind of on the back burner at the moment. Hopefully
once that is done they will give a better idea of their plans for 4.0
and what participation the public may play in that.

That said, you may want to take a look at -

   Subject: Proposal for 4.0 core control
      Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 17:47:23 +0200
      From: "Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde>
Newsgroups: povray.programming


and from Chris Cason in Sept. 2000,


 "Work on POV-Ray 4 has not yet begun.  However, there has been some
 discussion that we feel is of interest to the community.
 
 First, we have been discussing using a new license for 4.  Various
 open-source licenses are under consideration.  We might instead use an
 updated version of POVLEGAL.  No conclusions have been reached so far, but
 the topic is under discussion within the POV-Team.
 
 Second, we are also hoping to use a much more open development model for
 POV 4, with public read access to our source-revision tree.  System
 analysis, design, and implementation of POV 4 will be a very large task,
 and this is one way we hope to speed it up.  This open development model
 would also hopefully provide development releases (snapshots) more quickly
 to the power-user community, similar to what MegaPov offers now.
 
 Third, our most recent musings about POV-Ray 4 lean towards a major
 reworking of the POV Scene Description Language.  This means that POV 4
 may not be fully backwards compatible with old scenes.  If that is the
 case, we will plan to provide an official conversion utility that will
 convert old scenes into the new syntax, or provide some other means of
 importing old scenes. 

 Finally, the POV-Team is currently not going to be involved in any public
 discussion about POV 4.  We need to focus our efforts on POV 3.5.  Only
 after the release of POV 3.5 will work on version 4 begin.  The community
 can feel free to discuss this topic, but should not expect the POV-Team to
 read such discussions at this time."


How much of the above is still true is anyone's guess...

-- 
Ken Tyler

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