"Charles C" <"nospam a nospam.com"> wrote in message 
news:47ec9326@news.povray.org...
> With the recent talk about the object collection I thought I might 
> contribute an object I've been meaning to add.  It's simple, it lacks 
> bolts, ...
> Anyway, before I submit it, I was hoping to get some feedback, in general 
> and specifically on this:  I like using a system where something like 
> Main_Scene_File is a global variable and if it's already defined, a given 
> include file knows not to use a self-contained demo scene.   It means an 
> include file can stand alone as exactly one file.
> ... I know I've asked this before, and I've even wished for a 
> main_scene_file keyword, but I don't remember how it turned out for the 
> object collection.  What gobals can be truly global?

It looks fine to me the way you've done it, with the line commented out and 
a description of how to use it at the top of the file. Those wishing to use 
this system can readily uncomment the line. I think it would cause problems 
if it were distributed without the line being commented out because it would 
break the scene file of anyone who didn't know the system.

I too would like some system defined way of interrogating the include file 
chain. My preference would probably be for a read-only array listing the 
chain of files. If the array dimension length is '1' you'd know that the 
file you're in is being rendered directly. Anyone needing additional info 
about the include file sequence could start trolling back through the 
contents of the array.

I don't recall ever seeing a concensus or any agreement from the POV-Team to 
include such a feature in a future version of POV-Ray. I seem to remember 
rather that the discussion exploded into one about rewriting the whole 
language. It might be worth re-opening discussions about this on 
povray.general on the off-chance of getting some simple solution into 3.7.

I've explored quite a few alternative ways of achieving similar results with 
the current version of POV-Ray and I've not found any solution that I would 
claim to be 'best' in all situations.

Regards,
Chris B.

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