I just had an idea for an improvement to the POV-Ray scene language:

Get rid of all the object keywords except blob, julia_fractal, and poly.

This would not prevent the use of the other types of shapes, as all of the
other shapes can be created from these basic types using only the
'intersection', 'union', and 'inverse' keywords.

Doing this has many advantages:

First, it will make learning the language much easier.  By reducing the
number of object type keywords from 23 to 4, plus the CSG keywords
intersection and union.  All the other objects can be constructed from these
basic objects.

Second, it will reduce the time spent by the computer parsing the scene
files.  With the reduced number of keywords, the POV-Ray parser will have a
smaller list of words to check against, resulting in faster parsing and
quicker detection of syntax errors.

Third, this would make writing utilities to convert to or, primarily, from
the POV-Ray format significantly easier, as the programmer would have fewer
object types to contend with.

With all the benefits that implementing this proposal would provide, I
strongly urge the POV-Team to pursue this course of action.

Mark

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