In article <3db96c70@news.povray.org>,
 "Andrew Coppin" <orp### [at] btinternetcom> wrote:

> 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.

I know what you mean...I just finished redoing the memory management for 
G. It now uses some pretty low level pointer magic to use the same 
memory block as both stack and data space, function calls have very 
little overhead now, but my brain is pretty well fried. The STL helps 
sometimes, but in this case a more specialized structure was needed.


> > Try a post on one of these newsgroups, maybe advanced-users.
> Mmm... will maybe do that sometime... although it's not strictly
> POV-related...

Not POV specific, but raytracing related...post in the programming or 
advanced users groups.


> 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 ;-)

My raytracer has a Tracer object instead to manage things, shapes are 
mainly concerned with geometry, and it uses a tree of objects to 
evaluate the texture.


> 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! :-(

Thats what CSDL (now Sapphire) was originally supposed to be, just a 
translator. The first name was CSDL, for C-like Scene Description 
Language, then C-like Simulation Description Language, and then Sapphire 
because it isn't limited to either of those and I didn't like the 
acronym.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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