In article <405b7e15$1@news.povray.org>,
 David Burnett <var### [at] ntlworldcom> wrote:

> Fine, that we make a number of people happy, and satisfy many needs.
> Of course its a lot of work for someone, they would be writing a whole 
> language parser by the time people stopped suggesting features.  After 
> all I expect to be able to write a version of crackle it this that uses
> the checkerboard distance between points. Perhaps it might be better 
> just to put a complete parser in.

A shader language capable of doing this would indeed be very nice. I 
started such a thing with my G patch, now called Ember. Basically a 
simplified C, with additional features for vectors and colors, written 
for fast execution so it would be useful for shaders and other 
render-time uses.


>  > Lua and Python
> > would be too slow for most of the things functions are used for anyway.
> 
> Its faster for the things that can't be done in functions right now 
> though. And if you improve functions, well chances are it would be 
> faster for the next thing someone thinks about until someone adds it to 
> SDL.

They are too slow for anything that would be done at render time, so 
they would only be useful for building the scene. And although the 
existing POV language has problems doing anything really complex, those 
languages would be very clumsy at scene description. Extending the scene 
language seems like a far better solution...you end up with a language 
that has the required flexibility and power, but is still convenient for 
its intended use: scene description.


> I didn't know we there on about replacing SDL, I thought this was about
> extending it via a plugin language. Putting that aside and playing 
> devil's advocate the only real advantage SDL has is access to run time 
> information, everything else is syntactical sugar.

That syntactical sugar is the primary advantage, and it's a big one.
I'm no longer sure what problem you're trying to fix. You seem to want 
additional languages to avoid the limitations of the scene description 
language, but that assumes the scene language will always be as limited 
as it is now.


> Adding a plugin language would lower barrier for entry for other 
> programmers. They would not need to have the right compiler environment
> VC++ or CodeWarrior or be forced to compile a slower version of pov 
> because they do not have access to Intel's latest and greatest.

However, it would add another thing to do when porting POV to a new 
platform, another external thing that the developers have no control 
over, and we would have to support it. And this is for the interpreted 
languages you mentioned...compiled plugins *would* require a development 
environment.

> There would also be no dealing with the pov SDL parsing code to add a 
> quick new function or object.

That isn't exactly difficult. The parsing code is usually the easiest 
part to write.

-- 
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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