Vadim Sytnikov wrote:
> I'm sure that one day we will see functions as complex as shaders in
> RenderMan. By the way, I do not think that there exist any fundamental
> difficulty for that -- I know that many have branded that not feasible on
> portability grounds. But -- that only applies to the solution that was
> implemented in POVMan (based on POV-Ray 2.2, IIRC), which employed bytecode
> compiler built with Flex/Bison. If you look at how it was done in BMRT, you
> will find quite different solution, less powerful, but more portable (SL
> files are not even compiled, they are, err... preprocessed :-)
> 
POVMan's SL compiler output should be quite portable: bytecode is 
written as text byte-by-byte and there shouldn't be problems with endian 
  or word length.
To me BMRT's SL compiler output reminds more assembly language, than 
preprocessed statements. And POVMan's SLC is capable of similar output, 
only problem is that POVMan itself can't read this output (for this 'SL 
assembly' parsing should be implemented, but bytecode reading is much 
more easier).
One problem with using SL from POV is its complexity: one should deal 
with multiple files, compile them, learn new language etc. Additionally 
there could be legal considerations as well.

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