Shay <Sha### [at] cccc> wrote:
> All of this would add piles of pages to the documentation (a bad thing), 

  A bad thing why? You don't have to read those parts of the documentation
if you don't want to. You don't have to use the extra features if you don't
want to. But why would you want to remove the extra features from people
who could create awesome things with them?

  Imagine you could write this scene in POV-Ray:

#include "import3ds.inc"
import3ds("myscene.3ds");

  And that's it. Nothing more. And the scene renderes beautifully.

  But no, you don't want this. You want to remove any possibility of
doing this. You want to keep POV-Ray simple and dumb, without any tools
to actually make it more versatile and powerful than it already is.
When some newbie asks "can I convert a 3DS file to povray" you will
answer the old same "try this converter software which does a half-assed
job and might work or not".

  Making povray simpler and dumber is only going to hurt it.

> and provide (in most cases) nothing which could not be provided by 
> generating SDL with any given user's programming language of choice.

  How would you generate a shader which accesses a data container with
an external programming language if povray does not support that?

>  > * The most difficult thing of all: Some kind of shader language,

> How about keeping it simple? For instance, a function "surface" which 
> knows what every ray knows and works with POV-Ray's existing texture and 
> finish options.

  Why keep it needlessly simple when you could just as well write the
shader with the exact same scripting language you are creating the
scene with?

  What if you wanted to write a shader which, for example, spawns
additional rays? Or one which gives different results depending on
whether it's inside or outside a specific object?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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