> Additionally, being a programmer I find it hard/difficult to accept that 
> it is *completely*  impossible to export a great deal of pov-ray 
> functionality into one or many programs, and this is something that I 
> think I will at least experiment with once Lightwave arrives at my house.

It's possible in theory, it's just that no one has done much past a few
meshes.

> Essentially POV SDL is very close in structure to most C-like programming 
> languages, and given this, perhaps one could translate pov-sdl into some 
> form of XML which could be further manipulated using XSL-FO to produce 
> scenes or objects which could be loaded into another renderer, and 
> vise-versa.

It's quite a bit like C, the hardest parts, like the pre-processor commands.
Macros are parsed to replace multiple or even partial commands and objects.

> Seriously, a CSG is a CSG and a sphere is a sphere...
> Most of the complication I forsee would be in the translation of 
> materials, lighting models and particle effects, which would be less 
> complicated with procedural applications like Houdini and those compatible 
> with the Renderman interface, like BMRT.
>
> So logistically I think this is at least feasible, and at most a serious 
> PITA.

POV doesn't provide a tesselation of objects, so the tesselation would
need to come from the conversion utility, because unfortunately
a sphere is not just a sphere in many other formats, but a bunch of
triangles, or nurbs.

> If we can write programs which translate chinese into english, java to 
> c#/vb, and dwg to dgn, how hard could SDL conversion be?

Hard.

> I suppose I will find out! ;-D
>
> ian
> Nothing that seems logically possible will be any fun to attempt. ;-)

Good luck =)

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