On Sun, 30 May 1999 16:05:58 +0300, "Margus Ramst"
<mar### [at] peakeduee> wrote:

>However, I would greatly approve of a similar, but less radical approach.
>One that leaves alternatives.
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but all the conditionals, arrays, macros etc. serve
>one ultimate purpose: to generate and manipulate POV objects, textures etc.
>Nothing that couldn't be duplicated with a (big) scene file with none of
>those programming elements - just the objects et al.
>One could create an alternative parser, that outputs such a scene file. This
>way you would still have the option of the established language, but could
>try out the functionality of the new one.
>The question is, if anyone would be willing to create and maintain this
>parser. To this question, I have no answer.

It would be nice if one could "bolt on" a parser for a different
language, as with panorama.  Then one person could write a perl module
to do POV-ish things, another could provide for scheme scripting, and
still another could add python support.  I would be for such a thing,
because I think it would increase the power of the engine.  But it
will never happen, for two reasons:

1) doing so would fragment the language, in that I could have a really
cool object that you couldn't use because you hadn't installed the 
Haskell front-end to your copy of POV.

2) It would no longer be as portable. Many languages haven't been
ported to every platform that POV currently runs on.

These are both the same problems you encounter with plugins, and in
fact a new frontend would be a kind of plugin.

That leaves the "translator" approach, that takes say a Perl script
and outputs a POV scene file.  That would work, but you lose the
ability to implement the features people are asking for, like being
able to query the properties of existing objects.

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