In article <3993ce85@news.povray.org>, "Neil Freebairn" 
<nei### [at] lineonenet> wrote:

> 4th generation language, which here is my shorthand for words I'm not 
> familiar with to describe the kinds of features one sees in C, 
> Pascal, etc, and which weren't in POV3.0, but have started to appear 
> in 3.1, such as macros.

Ah, I see...I had seen that acronym before, but couldn't remember what 
it meant.
We have "functions"(macros, which do not behave like C macros, and 
iso-functions, which can only handle scalars and do not have 
conditionals), now we just need "pointers"(or "references", depending on 
your favorite language...not simply C pointers) and structs or 
classes(the objects could be used for this, just attach macros and 
variables to them).


> If this text is already (or could be) held in memory against the 
> identifier, the function should be straightforward to code - just 
> write it out, no need to even worry about types. I suggested it was a 
> conversion function, but that's incorrect.

The text that created an object is not associated with the identifier, 
only the object data itself is. You would have to write out code 
representing the current state of the object, so it *would* be a 
conversion function.
It might be possible to save the string that produced the object, but I 
have no idea how to do that.


> Ok. (D'oh!)
> If it wouldn't take too long, I think it might anyway be a valuable 
> addition to POV's functionality for debugging as the scene language 
> gets more and more sophisticated.

-- 
Christopher James Huff - Personal e-mail: chr### [at] maccom
TAG(Technical Assistance Group) e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
Personal Web page: http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
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