hi,

On 19/03/2016 21:25, Bald Eagle wrote:

I may get back to the rest of your post, time and inclination
permitting, but the following caught my eye, there appears to be a
certain amount of overlap in interest:

> Two ideas I have - and feel free to pursue these - are a sort of automatic or
> randomized code generation - since different string fragments could be strung
> together to make a whole functional SDL scene.  :D

way ahead of you here (at least wrt design), the idea is a set of GUI
panels[*], one each for camera, light, global_settings, etc.  they're
conceptually stand-alone, so a scene file which is complete bar, say,
the lighting, would have said element inserted when user writes/saves
that scene from the lighting panel.

the benefit, as I see it, is that the modularity allows developing a
complete application piecemeal.

> More practical though, would be a shorthand method for #declaring lots of
> variables.  I was trying to think about a way to do something like:
> #declare a=1; b=2; c=3; d=4; ...   and this seems to be the way to accomplish
> that.   Either through a loop, or by just arranging the variable names and
> values in an array.   That cuts out a ton of hand-typed #declares.

there's the potential problem of having a .pov which won't parse because
of syntax.  and, although the SDL is Turing-complete, I don't think it'd
be on my shortlist of tools when a pre-processor/generator needs
writing.  just a hunch (bearing in mind I'm still fairly new to much of
POv), but I'd keep modified syntax in separate file(s).

jr.


[*] my choice of tool is John Ousterhout's Tool Control Language (Tcl)
and its graphics toolkit.  if not familiar with Tcl, I'd recommend a
visit to https://wiki.tcl.tk.  Tcl is a source distribution but you can
get Windows binaries from www.activestate.com.  and if you feel flush,
the bible aka "Tcl and the Tk Toolkit" by J Ousterhout, now in its 2nd
edition, is very much worth the USD 60 cover price.

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