"Vadim Sytnikov" <syt### [at] rucom> wrote in message
news:3c8f298c$1@news.povray.org...
> "Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> > ...if you don't see it you never looked into the POV-Ray source
> > code nor the concept of these directives.
>
> If a language has an explicit pre-processing stage, then there is
something
> wrong with the language itself. My point is that POV-Ray must not expose
> that to the user -- and hopefully get rid of such internal subdivision as
> well.

The explicitness of a preprocessing stage has nothing to do with the
language itself.  For instance, MSVC will automatically, preprocess, compile
and link objects all in one step.  gcc on the other hand, has separate tools
for preprocessing, compiling, assembling, and linking (though you have a
common 'control' file to do it all at once).  In one of them, it is very
explicit; in the other, it is implicit.  But they both work.

That being said, I think it's important to maintain the distinction between
the preprocessing and the processing.  In fact, it might be useful to have
an option for outputting a preprocessed file, in case someone needs to see
exactly how their loops are unrolling or something like that.

...Chambers



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