I've heard rumours, so that's the reason for a
"AFAIK". I don't know who originally mentioned
it, and perhaps it was just a discussion amongst
those not able to program POV themselves, but
what they would like to see. Not sure.

Still, even a faster compiler could count as
being Plug-In Support. I was just thinking
in terms of Cinema4D, Maya and such, where
"outside" scripts can be used quiet efficiently to
enhance the GUI (although POV doesn't really
have its own one, but a Free Script Editor,
right? I mean, its not programmed by the
POV-Team, is it?) and modelling aspects.
The Include-Files of today may count as
plug-ins, but getting something which may make
them parse faster (more like bytecode, as
you mentioned, or easier handling as external
programms to be called inbetween frames) would
be very much appreciated (at least by me, I
tend to write these huge parsing-intensive scripts...).

Other than POV 4 being a dream, there is no
actual code there yet, is there? I mean, gathering
feature-ideas and such is in progress, perhaps
even spending some thought in how to go
about it, but no real code?

-- 
Tim Nikias v2.0
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights
Email: no_lights (@) digitaltwilight.de


>
> >  AFAIK,
> > POV-Ray 4 (which is a long way off, and
> > don't think about asking about it: it's finished
> > when its finished, as always with POV-Ray,
> > and I don't object) should have better support
> > for plug-ins (in other words: other support
> > than just POV-Script Include-Files) in order
> > to make writing own enhancements easier
> > and faster (as POV-Script is quiet slow).
>
> And where did you hear this?
>
> As you say, it's a long way off, too far off to say anything definite
> about plugin support. However, historically, native plugin support has
> never been implemented because there is no platform-independant way of
> doing it. POV could use precompiled bytecode plugins instead, but then
> there's no reason not to just include the source files: the bytecode
> compiler could (and almost certainly would) be built into POV. The
> current scripting language is slow because it is interpreted directly,
> compiling to bytecode first can be much faster, and would work just fine
> with the current system of include files.
>
> -- 
> Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
> POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
> http://tag.povray.org/


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