Ron Parker wrote:

> I don't understand this mindset.  If you need to know what transformations
> have been applied to object foo at some point in the future, keep track of
> what transformations you've applied.  What's so hard about that?

The main issue is the extremely hard extra work load ;-)

Well, there are situations when it just should be very convenient to be able to
collect info about an object by accessing the attributes of it. An example is in
a situation when you're writing an include file, and you want to access the
objects in the users file, without having to force the user to declare separate
values for camera locations, light source transformations etc. It's just a
question of simplicity and convenience.

An example - compare this:

camera{ location <0,1,-10>  look_at 0 }
#declare foo = light_source{ <50,50,-100> color rgb 1 }

...to this:

#declare camera_lookat = <0,1,-10>;
#declare object_position = <50,50,-100>;
camera{ location <0,1,-10>  look_at camera_lookat }
#declare foo = light_source{ object_position color rgb 1 }

Much less work needed to retrieve the look_at of the camera and the location of
foo using camera.look_at and foo.origin later in the file as provided in the fist
case, don't you agree? Much less work needed by the user, i.e....more user
friendly, to use a popular phrase... :)

Making POV-Ray (even) more user friendly at the same time as you're providing a
more powerful scripting language can't really be a bad thing, can it?

----------------------------------------------------
Mikael Carneholm, B.Sc.
Dep. of Computer Science and Business Administration


Personal homepage:
http://www.studenter.hb.se/~arch
E-mail:
sa9### [at] idautbhbse

Post a reply to this message