On 12.06.2025 05:21, William F Pokorny wrote:
> (*) - The declare feature identifiers, image_width, image_height and 
> maybe a half dozen more 'apparent keywords' are, internally, unprotected 
> identifiers. This is an opening for difficult SDL bugs. This said, I 
> don't plan to delete these 'apparent keywords' any time soon. I do plan 
> to remove the declare option.

There is a good reason these are identifiers and not keywords (any 
more). The architecture had a lot of separation issues in POV-Ray 3.6, 
MegaPOV and before that kept getting worse, and prohibited a lot of 
features that are useful.

The most notable is that the scene and the rendering can be separated. 
That is, you do not need to re-parse a potentially complex scene for 
hours just the render it in a higher resolution. There isn't even a 
reason to not move the camera after parsing (as the real-time 
ray-tracing feature shows).

The main problem has always been that a GUI was never developed for 
these features. So the question you probably want to ask yourself it if 
it really makes sense to throw all this overboard for an extremely 
complex command-line interface...?

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