On Wed, 30 Jun 1999 07:01:26 GMT, Glen Berry wrote:
>On Wed, 30 Jun 1999 01:59:46 -0400, "Mark Wagner"
><mar### [at] gtenet> wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>What about planes, triangles, and meshes? (Not to be confused with a
>comedy staring Steve Martin and John Candy.) Can these really be
>created with only the object types you mention?

A plane is a simple poly. A triangle is (sort of) an intersection of planes, 
though to get it right I think you'd still need clipped_by.  A mesh is just a 
union of a bunch of triangles.  But I'd like to see the code that replaces a 
text object (it is possible, though insanely ugly, and it only requires polys 
of degree 3 and lower.)

Oh, and you don't need inverse for anything but blobs or julias, either,  as 
flipping the sign of the poly accomplishes the same thing.

And while we're at it, let's get rid of area_light, since you can fake it with 
a grid of point light sources.  And we can get rid of either the matrix keyword 
or the rotate, translate, and scale keywords.  And we don't need color_map 
because you can do that with a pigment_map, but we don't need pigment_map 
because you can do THAT with a texture_map.  We don't need the checker, bricks, 
or hexagons patterns, because they can be synthesized with various gradients 
and the repeat warp.  I believe the repeat warp itself can be synthesized with 
various gradients, so long as you only use rational offsets (and all numbers 
are rational in a computer, so...)  We don't need marble, because it's just a 
texture_map of a couple of gradients.

I'm sure there's more stuff we can eliminate in our quest for syntactic purity
and orthogonality.  I mean, what's the point in doing this if you're only going 
to go halfway?  I say Mark's idea would only be good for slackers.

Oh, and pretend there's a HUGE smiley face at the end of this post, just as 
y'all should have at the end of Mark's post.

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