> The only possible issue I can see 
> is with a few things like rotate/scale, etc., where you might need to 
> use an enumeration to keep track of which one you are working with. But 
> that's not a huge problem. Lets say you have:
> 
> #declare body = object {... arm{rotate blah 'some other stuff' rotate 
> blah2} ...}}
> 
> And you want to adjust the "first" rotation.
> 
> body.arm.rotate(0)="<5,0,0>"
> 
> Wow! So hard... And the *initial* creation of the object didn't change 
> on tiny bit, its still standard SDL, you just now have more control over 
> each individual aspect of *that* object. And its not likely to be that 
> complicated to tell the difference between 'body.arm.rotate(0)
> ="<5,0,0>"' and say 'body.arm.texture(0).rotate(0)="<5,0,0>"', right?
> 

I don't know why somebody would need to change individual 
transformations. In addition, it could be cumbersome to refer to 
transformations by their numerical index Just to let you know: POV-Ray 
(currently) doesn't keep individual transformation statements. Every 
transformation you do changes the transform matrix of the object, so you 
can only do further transformations on the existing matrix. Only way to 
edit a previous transform would be to "undo" all that followed, re-do 
the changed transform with new parameters, and re-do all that followed.

Also, how would you handle this?
sphere {
    <1,2,3>, 0.5
    translate <12,35,61>
    texture { some_complex_texture }
    translate y*2
}
The first translate doesn't affect the texture, the second does.

I think we would be fine with body.arm.rotate(5,0,0) which affects the 
current transformation matrix just like current POV does, without having 
to keep every individual change that has been done.

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