> Since you seem to have put quite a lot of work into this i wonder why you
> did not write any information about you and the reason of your interest in
> POV.  

Thank you; it is really not that much work, just application of past
experience. :) 

As for why I did not tell about myself, - I thought it would be fitting
to remain a fleshless voice rather than seem to be boastful. :)

Well... my reason for interest in POV is essentially my interest for
complex software design, which has shifted in the past three years to
hierarchies of interacting polymorphic objects in particular. There's a
number of tasks for which such hierarchies are very appropriate; in
fact, to put it broadly, all the products where the actual program does
not know about exact structure of its data initially do qualify. (Some
examples are: multimedia players and editors - and all software for work
with compound documents; game engines, customizable user interfaces; I
even once wrote a compiler using the same approach, this is why I think
that such system can parse POV scenes as well.) Since POV is obviously a
program which provides "parts" and lets the end user organize them in a
scene, it does qualify - add my interest ing CG and there you go. (Okay,
I confess - add some frustration from spending hours on figuring out how
to do a particular kludge instead of spending them on meaningful work.
;) )

>A lot of the things you write indicate that you don't have much
> practical experience with POV-Ray and you don't know much about the recent
> feature discussion and development.

True, I confess I did not follow the "cutting edge" though I've lurked
in this group. No doubt some or many of the features discussed were
already implemented. 

What can I say - I provide an outsider's look here. Which you might
still deem useful, I hope...

> - 'instancing' (clone/refer patch) have been discussed and planned before
> but it isn't as simple as it might seem.

I never said it was simple - I only said it was more than worth making.
 
> - your language change suggestions involve a lot of additional keywords
> and much longer scene files which makes learning the language and writing
> scenes not exactly easier.

Sorry, this is not true. The language may be whatever we make it, to
begin with. No need to stick with what I wrote. :)

By the way, more keywords is not necessarily a bad thing, if they are
intuitive. Which is mor readable: 

 sphere { <0,0,0>, 1 }

or 
 
 sphere { center <0,0,0> radius 1 } ?

Readability is a great thing to have, don't underestimate it. And use of
words like "radius" is not so out of line with existing syntax which
after all uses words like "texture" already....

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