Hello,

First: English is not my mother language. I do my best to be clear. One way to
make sure that my message is clear is to reformulate my sentences.

I did not look at the code yet. But I ask myself two questions :



### Question 1 :

Would it be difficult to separate the renderer from the user interface ?
ie:
Would it be difficult to embed the function that reads the source code (that
represents the scene) and generates an image into a separate process ?



### Question 2 :

Are the parsing function (that reads the scene description) and the rendering
function well decoupled ?
ie:
Is the source code of the parser well isolated from the source code of the
renderer ?



### Explanation for the first question :

When porting a software, user interface is often painful. Furthermore, Povray's
user interface is essentially a code editor. It could be replaced by any serious
code editor, such Eclipse.
From my point of view, there is no reason to maintain the Povray's user
interface.

I guess that Povray does not use any OS dependant library for the rendering.

We could see the renderer as a compiler.



### Explanation for the second question :

Povray's language for scene description is quite archaic (for today's
standards).
My impression is that it was first a "descriptive language" (such as XML).
Then variables and macros were added, to make it a very basic "programming
tool".

If we can isolate the renderer code, we could interface it with languages such
Perl, Python, PHP... All the parsing and the hard work would be handled by the
(Perl, Python, PHP) interpreter. Furthermore, we could use the entire collection
of libraries available for these languages.



Best regards,

Denis

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