POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.binaries.utilities : ANNOUNCE: "VOP" - POV-Ray Previewer using OpenGL : Re: ANNOUNCE: "VOP" - POV-Ray Previewer using OpenGL Server Time
15 May 2024 17:47:58 EDT (-0400)
  Re: ANNOUNCE: "VOP" - POV-Ray Previewer using OpenGL  
From: Wolfgang Thaller
Date: 4 Mar 2002 09:39:51
Message: <3c838737@news.povray.org>


> Have you studied sources of POV-Ray ?  You probably did. All objects [...]
I'm aware of that, and I thought about it.

To summarize, my reasons for writing VOP as a separate program were the
following (and I do consider them to be good reasons):

1) "Smart Reparsing". If you change a variable in POV-Ray, the whole input
has to be reparsed. I wanted to avoid that, so I could not have used the
POV-Ray parser as is. Indeed I think it is very hard to make the POV-Ray
parser do that. It's hard enough to make it work in a specially designed
parser, and even there there's lots of work left for me to do.

2) Choice of Implementation Language.
I did not want to write the program in C, but in Haskell (www.haskell.org),
which is a modern, very high level programming language ("a non-strict
purely functional programming language") that I happen to like very
much.

I'm not saying that nobody should write an OpenGL renderer for POV-Ray.
I'm only saying that an OpenGL render integrated into POV would have
both advantages and disatvantages over my approach, at least for the
first few years of its life. I think it is my choice which of those
basic designs I devote my time to.

BTW, has anyone already tried out the program?
Discussions about design decisions taken one and a half years ago are nice,
but I'm desperately waiting for feedback on the program _itself_.


Cheers,

Wolfgang


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