> > I have also made a raytracer - in Java of all things! (Well, the
original
> > was made with Smalltalk - but who else actually has that?)
>
> You mean your original raytracer? Because "the original" raytracer was a
> piece of twine. ;-)

<groans>

Yes, I ment *my* original. And actually, it's just occurred to me - the
*very* _first_ prototype of it was actually done with Borland's Turbo Pascal
5.5 for DOS. (Anyone remember that ol' thing?)

> If you mean your original, it sounds interesting...I've always been
> interested in Smalltalk. I know of another raytracer written in
> Objective C, which is basically a halfway point between Smalltalk and C.

C hurts my head. I tried to make an interpreter for my own OOP language that
I designed... But pointers to arrays of pointers to pointers to functions is
just _not_ fun.

> (Actually, waaaaay back I tried emailling one of the POV-Team
> > members about the math, but never got an answer. Hardly suprising - they
> > probably get daft emails like this every second wednesday...)
>
> Try a post on one of these newsgroups, maybe advanced-users.

Mmm... will maybe do that sometime... although it's not strictly
POV-related...

> > PS. Isn't building a raytracer with OOP so confusing? Which kind of
"object"
> > are you talking about... ;-)
>
> Do what I did for my tracer: physical things are "shapes", objects are
> bundles of information/behavior. Gets rid of the ambiguity nice and
> neatly.

The way my tracer works, a "shape" described the 3-dimensional form of an
object; a "texture" basically maps points to surfaces, and a "surface"
described the object's surface characteristics. (I.e., by the wonder of
polymorphism, subclasses of Surface implements light-sourcing, reflection,
refraction one day, etc.) And "object" itself is the combination of a shape
and a texture. So anyway, I just renamed it to "item"... (Java doesn't like
you declaring classes called "Object"; could have done "Object3D" or
something, but "Item" is less typing ;-)

> > PPS. If I were God, POV_Ray's SDL would be object-oriented (in the
> > programming sense).
>
> It already comes close in some ways. I think it could be made into a
> prototype-based OO language with little modification.

I thought about writing some sorta thingy that would parse an input file in
my own custom-designed language, and spit out a result in ordinary POV-Ray
SDL. But I don't understand POV-Ray's SDL well enought to do it. (Ahhhh...
tell the trueth: you can't write a parser to save your life! :-(

Andrew.

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