Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> The suggestion of caching include files comes up every now and then. The 
> issue is that there is no way to determine if an include file is modified by 
> some other file. The only always reliable way to determine this is by 
> parsing the scene, defeating any optimization on parsing.

  Well, POV-Ray could officially take the stance that "once a macro has
been defined, that's it, it remains like that for the rest of the parsing".
In other words, the possibility of generating a new macro every time the
file containing the macro is included will be removed. However, I don't
think it would affect 99.99% of users. After all, it's such a level of SDL
hackery that nobody uses it (nor is there really a need for it, really).

  (Besides, if POV-Ray handles macros as filename-offset pairs, wouldn't
modifying the file in the SDL break that? If the file is modified via SDL,
then the offset of the macro inside the file will be subject to change,
which would hence break the parsing. I haven't tested this in practice,
though. If that is indeed the case, then there actually is no such possibility
in practice, so there's nothing to lose, really.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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