in news:418ac51b$1@news.povray.org Florian Brucker wrote:

> If you add a exec-command (to execute external programs), it would 
> enable us to write the database support as a inc-file, a method which
> I would prefer (not dependant on database-type, etc.). Of course 
> introducing an exec-command creates a big new potential for malicious
> pov scripts.

There was a patch by Dan Connoly (will he ever finish his bike-shop?).
It made it into the superpatch and was removed in later versions
because of security. 

Very often I wished there was still such an option, but when you think
a bit about what you want to achieve in a scene, it is almost always
possible to do it with the pre/post/scene/frame commands. About the
only exception is if you want external programs to do things based on
random based featuure of SDL during parsing the scene itself. Even if
there was an exec option, it would still be "tedious" to start and stop
an external application many times until you have the desired result. 

Would it technically be possible to add some kind of dynamic pipeline
exec thing to POV-Ray? So you can call an application once and if it
needs some more data it just asks "Hey POV, shoot a ray in that
direction and return me the following data ..." until a final
conclusion is reached and it can return the right data back to SDL. 

Regarding databases, a few months ago I did a few ultra simple tests 
using POV-Ray to write SQL to a file, then use the post frame command to 
start a Python script that reads it an queries the database. Then this 
script does something with the resulting data and writes it as a SDL 
parsable script to file. 


Ingo

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