On Sun, 30 Sep 2007 15:43:13 -0700, William Tracy wrote:

> If that were the only problem, the extra flexibility would be well worth
> it.

Only so far as the features one wants are in the OS that one is using.  
If you've used any OS other than Windows in the last 10 years, you've 
come to expect that full functionality may not be available in the OS of 
your choice.

Purposefully designing a program so that this can happen is a bad idea.  
If you pop over to the povray.unix group, you can see that some are 
already unhappy with the fact that POVRay on Windows has a "nice GUI" 
<spit - I prefer CLI myself>, but on *nix platforms, all you get is an 
"ugly CLI interface".

Now extend that to features in the language itself - that's a recipe for 
chaos, because the POVRay you use on *nix may not necessarily have the 
same functionality as the Windows version, and your scene files won't 
actually render because of missing functionality.  You end up with an SDL 
that is *not* portable.  Nonportability is BAD.

> Besides, we already have that showing up with people using modelers and
> such. Remember that Pose-ray is Windows-only?

That's a bit different than limiting the featureset of POVRay itself for 
users of some OSes.

Jim

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