David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:
> 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.

  While a new SDL should definitely have strong tools for abstraction
(object-orientedness being one good choice for this), it should still
retain the simple procedural approach of the current SDL. Procedural
programming is the easiest to learn quickly.

  As I see it, there are two possibilities:

1) Design a scripting language fine-tuned from the ground up for use
with POV-Ray.

2) If an existing language is used instead, it makes no sense to have to
write a parser for it, but it would be a much better idea to use an
existing parser (and bytecode interpreter VM) which has been specifically
designed to be integrated in C++ programs (such as lua or angelscript).

  As I see it, it makes little sense to use an existing language which
has not been designed for POV-Ray and which has not been designed for
integration with C++. It will simply cause more problems than it's worth.
If the language lacks an easily-approachable procedural programming paradigm,
all the worse. (With this I don't mean that the language should not have
OOP support.)

> The commercial system have "free for non-commercial" 
> licenses.

  Yet I believe POV-Ray 4.0 is still planned to be free to use even for
commercial purposes.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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