</lurker>

Hello everybody,

I'm new to this group and never posted before, my knowledge about POV-Ray is
really small. That said, I'd wanted to point peoples interrested about the
scripting abilities to a few ressources about Parrot, the next Perl 6 VM:

Parrot's Homepage:
        http://www.parrotcode.org/

Parrot's wiki:
        http://www.vendian.org/parrot/wiki/

Dan Sugalski's blogs:
        http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/
        
Lurk the newsgroups (read-only):
        nntp://news.perl.org/perl.perl6.*
or register to get them via the mailing lists (rw):
        http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl6-all
before you might want to browse them on Active State web site:
        http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Browse/Threaded/perl6-internals
        http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Browse/Threaded/perl6-language
or have a look at Piers Cawley'Summaries of the both lists:
        http://dev.perl.org/perl6/list-summaries/
        
Perl 6 Homepage (it's also parrot related):
        http://dev.perl.org/perl6/

        
I think it may be a good oportunity for POV-Ray to give a look at what's going
on with Parrot, here's some pro/con that were given in this thread about
scripting abilities of POV-Ray (I'm not quoting here, just remembering a few
comments):

Development time: Someone said that POV-Ray developers should spend more time
working on the rendering engine than on the parsing one. This is a really
important statement and delegating the inner working of parsing, compiling,
executing, JITing, Garbage Collecting, multiple platforms support and so on, to
peoples used to do that everyday would be a winner. Net benefits will also raise
from the infrastructure already in place for the scripting language:
tinderboxes, testings, communities already built around the scripting engine.
Though, depending on how one might embed a scripting language, a C/C++ API for
POV-Ray might probably be needed, or POV-Ray specific opcodes. Parrot's
already running inside PostGRES and there's a mod_parrot for Apache, oh and 
there's already a Parrot and SDL implementation of tetris... 

- Language choice: peoples proposed lua, mono, perl, python, tcl, and other
scripting languages. Here is what's in the languages directory of the last
Parrot's tarball: BASIC, Befunge-93, befunge, bf, cola, conversion, forth, imcc,
jako, m4, miniperl, ook, parrot_compiler, perl6, plot, python, regex, ruby,
scheme, tcl, urm. Some are functional, some not yet, but all those languages are
compiled into parrot's byte code and they can share modules between them. Of
course POV-Ray probably doesn't need all the CPAN modules, but, admit it, 'use
Moon::Phase; use Weather::Underground;' might come handy to add some realistic
features to a scene, no? ;-) And still in the idea of benefitting from other
languages user base, questions like "How do i do function xxx and loop from here
to there?" might be redirected to comp.lang.*.

- Sandboxing: Some people suggested that too much scripting abilities might be
harmful, in the form of trojans, exploits, etc. As every decent scripting
language these days, Parrot will of course support what I/O and opcodes might be
executed. The sand boxing system, which is yet to be worked on, was recently
discussed on the perl6-internals list.

I hope to get some of you interrested in having a look at this promising VM, 
going back to shadow mode now...

<luker>

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