David Buck schrieb:
> 
> I'm going to make a radical proposal for you to think over.
> 
> As POVRay's SDL has evolved over the years, it's become more and more 
> like a programming language.  I think it's worth considering pushing it 
> into a real programming language.
> 
> These days, I do most of my work in Smalltalk.  It's one of the simplest 
> yet most powerful programming languages around.
> [...]

The question of the general concept of a new SDL or extension of the 
existing one has already been discussed quite a lot (some of it in 
private) - although there has not been anything definite on the matter 
yet some important issues have crystallized that stand against your 
suggestion.

Anyone agrees that the current SDL lacks important features for coding 
more complex functionality and the current design significantly limits 
performance of SDL code interpretation.  Both together make it difficult 
to extend POV-Ray's features using the SDL.

Another problem of the current language is that the different levels of 
the language are difficult to understand for the beginner - the use of 
loops and macros in user defined functions being a good example.

But the most important thing is it needs to be straight away to do 
simple scenes using it.  Languages like Smalltalk appeal to the ones who 
know them because they are very consistent on the whole.  The price for 
this however is that even for the most simple tasks you need to 
understand most of the language's advanced concepts and this makes it 
fairly unsuited as a SDL.

In short:  Simple tasks like a reflective sphere over checkered plane 
need to be straight away to implement and to read - without knowing 
about language concepts.  Like in the current SDL version of such a 
simple scene the purpose of every token should be intuitively 
understandable.  More complex features of the language would need to be 
optional additions to this.

-- Christoph

Post a reply to this message