-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

nemesis wrote:
> Shay <Sha### [at] cccc> wrote:
>> I don't want to start a drawn out POV vs. RIB comparison
> 
> too late. ;)
> 
> anyway, I was wrong about Pixie.  Good to know it has native support for
> geometric primitives, CSG and the likes, without resorting to huge meshes.
> Good to know too about its SDL.
> 
> It's a bad thing though that XML has f*cked up so many minds through the
> industry:  you can't have anymore a good ol' little domain specific
> language to do the job without resorting to XML syntax or something quite
> the same, like Pixie's and YAFRay's.  What's wrong with {} blocks?  What's
> the matter with "Object.attribute = value"?  I can see the horrific day
> when Java comes blended with XML syntax...
> 
	Well, according to Wikipedia, the first release of Renderman dates
back to 1989, whereas work on XML didn't even start until mid-1996,
so you can hardly accuse XML of having contaminated the
specification of Renderman :)

	As to why these languages look like they do instead of a simple
C-like syntax, the main reason is that they were designed to be
primarily interchange formats. This means that they were meant to be
generated by a program and read by another. They were never really
intended to be generated by hand. Because of this, they have a
syntax that is *very* easy to parse for a computer (as an example,
the XML grammar fits in about 200 lines, whereas the C grammar takes
over 400 lines (and that's *without* the preprocessor!)

		Jerome
- --
+------------------------- Jerome M. BERGER ---------------------+
|    mailto:jeb### [at] freefr      | ICQ:    238062172            |
|    http://jeberger.free.fr/     | Jabber: jeb### [at] jabberfr   |
+---------------------------------+------------------------------+
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFG4589d0kWM4JG3k8RAsvaAJ9y9JJsOmuCOl4LvioTd8IzmHUuoQCgq7Sw
sk2JPkOte3EeX53ozjoY7vM=
=wm02
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Post a reply to this message