Well, that was educational and clarifies even more of the morass of issues
you're dealing with to unravel the POV-Ray source code.

Let me throw this out there:

POV-Ray has some things like the parametric that can be "precomputed".

Perhaps there's a way to create some new things that POV-Ray does that can be
compiled cleanly, and give rise to a significant increase in speed for those who
desire/need it, and those who want to write scenes in "legacy code" aren't
affected.

#precompile
     code
     code
     code
#end


Another idea is to have some other engine running alongside the main POV-Ray
that tasks can get handed off to.  And surely no one wants to do that.

But just to think out loud, because sometimes bad ideas spark good ideas:

Do something along the lines of define a flag, start a block of precompile code,
and hand-off the contents of this block of code to the compiler.  While the flag
doesn't exists, wait.  When the flag exists (code compiled, optionally saved)
then run the compiled code and continue parsing.
If the compiled code gets saved, invoking this method would check to see if the
code's already been compiled and saved, and skip recompiling.


And all of this is likely a delusional pipe dream, but as usual, thanks for
listening.  :)  ;)

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