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Jim Henderson wrote:
> 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.

Yeah. Vista *still* doesn't seem to support sed, or even grep. I don't
know how anyone even gets anything done on Windows. :-D

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

I am seeing your point.

In all fairness, there *are* platform-independent uses for this sort of
thing. How about being able to call Python from SDL? You don't want to
just hard-code links to Python in POV...because then the Perl and Ruby
hackers would get mad. ;-)

Anyway, I think we both agree on the fundamental points--cross-plaform
is good, and flexibility is also good. Possibly we're just disagreeing
on how this sort of feature would end up getting used.

In any case, POV bindings to external programs are probably not going to
happen, so this discussion is mostly moot, anyway.

- --
William Tracy
afi### [at] gmailcom -- wtr### [at] calpolyedu

You know you've been raytracing too long when you want to cheat and look
at nature's source code.
    -- Mark Stock
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