Interesting ideas.

Some thought should be given as to what purpose
is being served by POV-Ray's scene description
language. If people are writing directly in it,
then making the language easier to write in
is merited. If the language is meant to act
as an interface between the renderer and
other applications (like PostScript), then
parsing speed, file size efficiency, and
availability of atomic features that can be
scalably combined should be foremost.

It is often the case that the two situations
tend to be mutually exclusive. Programmers
write in C++, for example, but this code
is then compiled into a form that CPUs
can better deal with. One can write in
machine code, of course, but few bother.
Over time, compiler evolution has produced
a design that gives programmers most of
what they need without seriously degrading
execution performance.

The creation of a more user-friendly
scripting language should likely be done
as a separate front end, whose syntax is
then translated into what POV would use.
A front end that is 3.x compliant can be
written to provide a bridge to 3.x users.
Many front ends, of course, would be
modellers.

Ray

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