Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
> I have to be realistic here and take the approach that attempting to write a
> new SDL prior to releasing the tree for folks to work on would not be
> practical. On the other hand, the existing parser has to be replaced since it
> is fairly cumbersome and hard to maintain.

> The fact is that once we are done, it will be possible to have any number of
> parsers that interface to the rendering engine; whatever we put into the tree
> for initial development will only be one of them (and most likely not the
> final). Once we've got some momentum and reasonable functionality in the re-
> development of the rendering core, I expect more attention can be paid to the
> parser.

  I'm not sure I have any reason to, but what I fear is that once the
developement of POV-Ray becomes completely open, if it so happens that
nobody takes the role of strong leader ("dictator") or nobody is accepted
as such, what will happen is that there will be too many cooks spoiling
the broth and no general agreement is ever reached over which kind of
scripting language should be adopted and implemented. Even if an attempt
at designing such a language, the "too many cooks" will only stir the mud
and without that strong leadership the entire thing can become a complete
mess.
  As I see it, the three most likely scenarios are:

  1) A good agreement is never reached, and since nobody is "forcing" a
change, a new refactored SDL is never created and the current SDL will be
used forever regardless of its great limitations.

  2) An agreement is reached (good or not) and an implementation attempt is
made, but again, without anyone "forcing" it in, too many people will protest
against the change and the new scripting language will not gain wide usage
and will never reach "gold status".

  3) I would say the most likely scenario: Someone will embed an existing
scripting language (such as LUA) as an *alternative* to the existing SDL.
Again, since nobody is "forcing" the change to the new SDL only few people
will use it, and most importantly, since this existing scripting language
is not designed from scratch to support POV-Ray specifically, it will only
be half-useful. It will also look so much different from the current SDL
that not many people will be eager to change to it.

  So in summary, I fear that a half-hearted attempt might be attempted,
but the result will not be as good as it could be.

> Of course, there's nothing to stop people discussing and perhaps designing a
> new SDL in advance - and perhaps even prototyping it in a stand-along app
> (e.g. perhaps something that spits out POV 3.x code).

  The main reason for the need for a new scripting language is that the
current SDL is very limited (and slow). There are things which are simply
impossible to do. Thus making a prototype of a more flexible and powerful
language which is then simply converted into existing SDL would not be
possible.
  Another thing which I envision is that many of the features of the new
scripting language could be used during rendering (shaders being one example)
and after rendering (for post-processing effects). It would obviously just
not be possible to simply make a converter to the existing SDL to test
these features.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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