andrel wrote:
> 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.
>>
> 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.
> 

There's no reason why we couldn't do that.  The advantage we get from 
the Smalltalk side, though, is being able to procedurally define new 
shaders right within the SDL.  With this scheme, if I wanted a variation 
of Marble, I could code it in Smalltalk and have it called as needed 
from the renderer.  With the existing structure of POVRay, you'd have to 
modify the C source and enhance the SDL accordingly in order to create a 
new shader - way too much work.

David Buck

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