Patrick - Thank you for your response

Patrick wrote:
> The problem is, this "breaks" current implementation. Now, that doesn't
> mean you couldn't write a failure simply recursive system to "find and
> fix" such references, or even eventually design the editor to
> "recognize" them and automatically give you MS Studio style recall, like
> typing "jed." and having a pop-up list of thing "in" jed.inc, including
> fred.jed.<blah>.

I had been thinking along these lines before.  However, once I started
asking myself the rhetorical question "What is POV-Ray?", I realized that
the word "editor" does not appear in the answer.  POV-Ray - as it exists
now - does not require the use of a specific editor.  To add that
requirement to its use would make it more costly and less accessible.

> In other words, its not trivial, but hardly impossible
> to write a function like "Convert this scene and its includes to new
> naming system", and automatically fix all of it, saving the new files
> under slightly different names, to preserve the originals.

What I am proposing would actually rewrite the deeper includes (those called
by other includes).  The rewriting would occur in the buffer - not in the
files themselves, thus protecting the contents of the original includes.
The rewriting would follow a fail-safe algorithm, applied the same way onto
every includes-tree.  There would be no need to "ask" to reuse an identifier
from a deeper include.

-Randall

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