On 25 Feb 1999 00:46:05 -0500, BC <bir### [at] iinetnetau> wrote:
>Have a read of the Knuth "Art of Computer Programming" series for example.
>I actually really enjoy the challenge of working around the limits of the
>language. But maybe I'm a masochist.

If you can actually read TAOCP all the way through, yes, you're a masochist.
I'm about halfway through volume 1, following the algorithm in the front of
the book (read all volumes, repeat indefinitely) and I had to take a break.

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If you want to keep the values of an array (or several) between frames, why
not save the whole array sequentially to a file at the end of the parse of
each frame and then load the whole thing at the start of the next frame.
You can then just use the arrays as you are at the moment.

This should only need a couple af simple Macros and the process is
essentially automatic from there on.

Good Luck and Regards
Gordon

PS
I do agree it would be a very useful feature though. I would also like to
be able to read general text files. Like the Readln function in pascal for
example. Just read the whole line, delimiters and all into a string
variable and leave it to the program to decode the data. I came up against
this when I tried to write a routine to read two identically structured
POVRay source files and interpolate the values for animation.

Any way, no doubt the POV-Team will suprise us with many neat new features
in the next version.

Margus Ramst <mar### [at] peakeduee> wrote in article
<36D50A92.8B882231@peak.edu.ee>...
> BC wrote:
> > 
> > I actually really enjoy the challenge of working around the limits of
the
> > language. But maybe I'm a masochist.
> > 
> 
> To a certain point, it's fun. From then on, it's tedious and just plain
> impractical. Some projects I've worked on have required very extensive
and
> very dynamic data processing, tens of thousands of data lookups and
> stores. Thank God (or the POV team) for arrays - but these are useless
for
> animation.
> Mine may be an extreme case, but I'd rather just specify an offset to the
> read/write. This shouldn't be too difficult to implement (and is one of
> the top items in my wishlist).
> 
> Margus
>

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