"David H. Burns" <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> Someone told me that the next version of Pov-Ray would be OOP. Horrors!
> Another
>   useful and fun thing lost to EEP. Another triumph of the EPP! (It
> seems to me that
> the Pov-Ray scripting language already makes more intelligent use of
> "objects" than OOP.) Will we
> next see Microsoft Visual Pov-Ray.Net along with Microsoft Pov-Ray
> Development Systems?
>
> Alas, Alas, Tell me it isn't so.
>
> David

Why do you associate OOP with .Net?

Did you know that you can program OOP with functional or imperative languages?
That it's a design philosophy more than a language feature?

Besides, there are already integrated modellers and development environments for
POV-Ray.  None from MS (yet), but they are there ;)

....Chambers

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Chambers wrote:

> Why do you associate OOP with .Net?

Needless complexity.
> 
> Did you know that you can program OOP with functional or imperative languages?
> That it's a design philosophy more than a language feature?
Seems to be both.
> 
> Besides, there are already integrated modellers and development environments for
> POV-Ray.  None from MS (yet), but they are there ;)


None from MS and not exclusively from MS. IDE's themselves are great 
tools. We probably need more.

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Invisible wrote:

> 
> 2. What would be so bad about this being true?
It would be too complex to be usable by ordinary folk (i.e. me).
> 
> 3. What the hell is EEP?
Extremely Elite Programming (my coinage)

EPP -Elite Programmer Priesthood, although you didn't ask.
(smile-- how does one put those smiley icons in?)

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David H. Burns <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> Chambers wrote:

> > Why do you associate OOP with .Net?

> Needless complexity.

  That didn't answer the question at all.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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David H. Burns <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> Someone told me that the next version of Pov-Ray would be OOP. Horrors! 

  Could you please elaborate what's so horrible in object-oriented
programming?

  The whole idea of object-oriented programming is to make it *easier* to
write programs, especially compared to straightforward imperative/structured
programming (as the SDL is currently).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 21-7-2009 18:04, David H. Burns wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
> 
>>
>> 2. What would be so bad about this being true?
> It would be too complex to be usable by ordinary folk (i.e. me).
>>
>> 3. What the hell is EEP?
> Extremely Elite Programming (my coinage)
> 
> EPP -Elite Programmer Priesthood, although you didn't ask.
> (smile-- how does one put those smiley icons in?)
> 
The original way by using colons and brackets. If you have an recent 
newsreader it will substitute the smileys.

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David H. Burns <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> Invisible wrote:

> > 
> > 2. What would be so bad about this being true?
> It would be too complex to be usable by ordinary folk (i.e. me).

  And exactly how do you know this?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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"David H. Burns" <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> Someone told me that the next version of Pov-Ray would be OOP. Horrors!

Definitely not: The next version to come - POV-Ray 3.7 - will feature just the
same SDL as 3.6, except where functionality has changed and require adaptation
of the SDL.

Replacing the SDL has been discussed for POV-Ray 4 though, including the idea to
provide much better support for OO programming. But that's still some time to
go, and to my knowledge no concrete decisions have been made yet.

(BTW, shame on you - this topic's off topic here... :P)

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"David H. Burns" <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> > 2. What would be so bad about this being true?
> It would be too complex to be usable by ordinary folk (i.e. me).

Not if it's done right.

It might be too complex for ordinary folk to make use of its *full power*, but
simply coding a scene should be no tad more difficult than it is ATM.

To the contrary: It might allow programmers to write more sophisticated "macro"
suites and make them much easier to use for ordinary folk.

(All provided POV-Ray gets a custom-tailored language; with any "off-the-shelf"
language I've seen so far, you'd likely be right: It would become unnecessarily
cumbersome.)


I can understand your resentments: When I first came into contact with anything
officially labeled "OOP", I just thought "WTF?!" - that was Borland's "Turbo
Vision" for Turbo Pascal 6. It looked like it made programming absurdly ugly
and complex, and the section on OOP in the manuals started out in a way that
didn't seem to make any sense to me.

Next time I was introduced to OOP, however, I found that I had been using OOP
concepts already, and what was labeled "OOP" were actually just language
features that made it simpler to implement them, and more-or-less useful
libraries making use of these.

As for the ugliness, I found that most of it was the particular ugliness of the
Turbo Vision framework - or rather actually Borland's idea of how they should
be used - and had nothing to do with the language's OOP extensions in general,
and the residual ugliness was due to these extensions having been designed into
an already-existing language.

Another reason for people experiencing OOP as particularly complex is that many
people encounter it in the context of graphical user interfaces and stuff like
that (a good deal of Turbo Vision, too, was dedicated to windowing user
interfaces, though they were text-based back then); often the high complexity
of the user interfaces is then wrongly associated with OOP in general.


BTW, a work colleague of mine, who *started* his programming carreer with OOP,
was struck with horror when he first made contact with classical procedural
programming...


The bottom line is this: If the language is designed with care, supporting OOP
will allow "wizards" to write libraries with very elegant interfaces, without
interfering with the ease of general scene coding.

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I've looked at enough OOP programs. Pov-Ray's current scripting language
  is easy to use once you learn the syntax. All that the introduction of 
OOP would do
is to make it more difficult and time consuming to write a workable 
script. It matters
little to me if the Pov-Ray source is written in OOP, though I think it 
would be a step
  backwards or maybe side ways. (In fact it will probably become 
necessary for the source
code to be written in OOP at least until the fad dies.) I am unlikely to 
look much at the source
  code. I looked at it earlier because I wanted to try to do something 
that I thought couldn't be done
current Pov-Ray --make a "mirror" surface whose "reflection" is 
controlled by a supplied
algorithm. I now think that this can be done (at least to some extent) 
with "normals".

What I don't want to see is the scripting language OOPified! As I said 
it already uses "object" with "data
  members" and "methods", but it doesn't require the complex and (to my 
mind) arcane OOP structure
and "philosophy".

David


Warp wrote:

>   And exactly how do you know this?
>

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