Warp wrote:

>   No, it's not about what everyone wants, it's about what
> POV-Ray needs.

The Big Picture:

What POV-Ray needs to survive for another 15 years is for a decent 
number of people to post high-quality work on places like CGTalk. For 
that to happen, the program needs rendering capabilities and users.

Features like shaders (with necessary procedural capabilities), improved 
motion-blur, improved AA, nurbs, an accessible scripting language, and 
modeller integration will draw more users and allow those and current 
users to create more impressive works. Adding clutter (and almost 
certainly new bugs) to the interface for the purpose of overlapping the 
capabilities of existing, non-renderer tools will not.

The low-level language creating the mid-level language creating the 
high-level language (resulting in "#include ... function-call ( ...") is 
a programmer's fantasy somewhat like "you can use c++ as a high-level 
language if you have the right libraries." Introduce lower-level 
programming tools into the SDL for the purpose of coding 
mesh-manipulation or text-reading libraries, and these tools will creep 
into the high-level (common user) code. The effect of this is that 
examples of POV SDL become nearly useless to those not familiar with a 
very large portion of the SDL.

> Also, POV-Ray cannot simply drop its scripting language. This is
> simply because the scripting language is one of the major features,
> which differentiates it from many other similar renderers.

Agreed, but this scripting support must be accessible to draw and keep 
users.

  -Shay

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