In article <38ca2675@news.povray.org>, "Bob Hughes" 
<per### [at] aolcom?subject=PoV-News:> wrote:

> I had to wonder about your viewpoint on this for a moment but my 
> sentiments lean toward the hashmark (#) as being one of the things 
> that shows the person, not the parser alone (however that works), 
> where each of those special keywords are.

On the other hand, newbies might be scared away by a file full of 
mysterious commands with hash marks in front of them. :-)
Remember that the reason you use them as visual cues is that you are 
familiar with the language.


> But what may be getting overlooked is how POV has a programmer 
> language of sorts simply by being what it is: textual interface.  The 
> continuance of that into more features isn't the issue I'm sure, it's 
> the syntax that is the hub of this discussion.  By that reasoning it 
> should not ever be a hard-core programming language, instead it 
> should always be a common vocabulary most of all.

Well, it definitely shouldn't become a "hard-core programming language", 
since it's purpose is to describe scenes. But some of the features of 
more advanced languages would make the description of complex scenes 
including trees, plants, particle effects(like the Liquid Spray include) 
much easier. You wouldn't even have to understand them, you could just 
use include files written by others.

-- 
Chris Huff
e-mail: chr### [at] yahoocom
Web page: http://chrishuff.dhs.org/

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