"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:

>
> When you do it the cancat way - POV-Ray sees it as a string.
> When you do it the #include way - it parses it as a keyword.

Apparently so. In some miraculous and secretive way, known only to the Gods :-P
>
> Maybe something handy would be to have something like
>
> keyword (my_keyword) so the whole write/read/parse sequence could be avoided
>

What interests me about the Parse_String macro is that it does two seemingly
separate operations simultaneously (well, one after the other)-- #write and
#include. For some strange reason, I thought that the parsing/processing of a
macro would have to go past its #end statement, before anything actually
happened (with the result that an error would be encountered at the #include
line);  but that's not the case. It's a happy (if late) new discovery for me.
;-)

That macro construction looks like a compact 'shorthand' way to avoid coding
separate #write/#read statements (doing away with #read altogether), while
producing the same results (?). Pasting that short macro *into* scene code would
do away with #include as well.

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