David Buck wrote:
> Chris Cason wrote:
>> I have had a look at a few embeddable languages, such as AngelCode (see
>> http://www.angelcode.com/angelscript/) but haven't come to any solid
>> conclusion yet.
> 
> I'm going to make a radical proposal for you to think over.
> 
> As POVRay's SDL has evolved over the years, it's become more and more 
> like a programming language.  I think it's worth considering pushing it 
> into a real programming language.
> 
> These days, I do most of my work in Smalltalk.  It's one of the simplest 
> yet most powerful programming languages around.  Building a Smalltalk 
> compiler/interpreter is not terribly hard (I've done it before) and if 
> you wish, there are commercial systems (and freeware systems) which you 
> can already use.  The commercial system have "free for non-commercial" 
> licenses.
> 
> A few years ago, I built a simple little raytracer in Smalltalk to see 
> what it would be like.  Here's what the scene description code looks 
> like in this system (The code below is extracted directly from that 
> reaytracer and it renders an actual image.):
> 
> "This method renders a scene and displays it in a window"
> view
>     self show: self renderImage
> 

[snip rest of smalltalk code]

> 
> I'll leave it at that for now.
> 
> By doing this, you can make libraries of textures, shapes, finishes, 
> light sources, etc. which can be reused.  The definition of an entire 
> scene could exist in one class and could re-use common textures, shapes, 
> etc.  You have the full power of Smalltalk to build the shapes including 
> loops, conditions, random numbers, importing data from files, writing 
> out files, etc.  You also have the full power of the development 
> environment when running including inspecting your scenes and debugging 
> the rendering.
> 
> I know this is coming from left field, but it's good to think about some 
> radical ideas every once in a while to really inspire innovation.
> 
> Discussion is welcome.
> 
Is there any reason why your smalltalk could not automagically output 
SDL and renderImage be implemented as a system call to POV?
Because that is basically the way I use it in matlab, and want to 
continue to do so in POV 4.0

My suggestion for a 'new' language would be to have an as simple as 
possible language (without loops and control structures) that is easy to 
parse for a machine but not necessarily for a human. Plus an easy way to 
integrate that with a front end, one of those should be a pov 3.6 style 
language. Or perhaps as the only front end, because if everybody can 
make his own language we may not be able to share our sources.

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