By encourage its use I mean that if it is a formally accepted concept within
POV
then people are more likely to know its there and more likely to use it -
especially
when they see the benefits of re-using other peoples objects without any
re-scaling
required.    I did not know of the existence of Sonya Roberts "Units"
include file
until you pointed it out - what if someone else out there defined another
"Units" file
which other people used - the definition of mm,cm,m,ft & in might be totally
different -
standardisation has not been achieved nor generally portability of objects.
If I copy
an object from someone's scene using an alternative definition of the units
then it will
not just drop in to mine and work - yes I know I could scale it but that's
not the point.

lets say I have a scene with a toy train in it which you would like to copy
into your scene,
but I have defined

#declare in = 1
#declare ft = 12
#declare cm = 2.51
etc

in this scenario you would need to apply scaling to my object when you use
it, all I'm saying
is that if the system was formalised into the parser then a) it would be
more readable and b)
more people would use it as you could simply incorporate other peoples
objects without
having to do anything other than cut and paste.

Alan Smith.

"ABX" <abx### [at] abxartpl> wrote in message
news:d0rmkvk6ki62c2hq3h5frdkb1rbe1q5c1q@4ax.com...
> On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 15:17:55 +0100, "Alan Smith"
<ala### [at] aurora-ukcom>
> wrote:
> > Many thanks for the link to the include file.   This is what I currently
do
> > myself, however
> > I still make the point that it would be usefull to formalise it within
> > POV-Ray itself as this would
> > encourage its use and lead to greater code portabillity.
>
> Could you elaborate on "encourage its use" and "greater code portabillity"
?
> Personally I do not see those benefits but I can blind for something. In
> particular what could be done with '1cm' which can't be done with '1*cm' ?
>
> ABX

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