In article <405f2a3f$1@news.povray.org>,
 "Chambers" <bdc### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

> How difficult would it be to allow SDL access to predeclared objects?  Ie,
> you'd use something like this:
> 
> #declare obj = firstObject;
> 
> // obj is now a reference to the first declared object
> 
> #declare loc = obj.location;

obj has a location? What's the location of an infinite plane? Or a julia 
fractal?


> #declare pig = obj.texture.pigment;
> #declare med = obj.interior.media;

Which media? You can have more than one.


> #declare shine = obj.texture.finish.specular;

And which texture? What if the object has layered textures?


> I'm not interested in changing the objects already declared, just in getting
> information about them.  I don't see that there would be any technical
> difficulties, and it would be hugely advantageous for particle simulations,
> among other things.

It would require writing a lot of special code for each object type, and 
as already mentioned, the specified object parameters may no longer 
exist in the same form, and some things can exist in multiple forms. You 
could parse objects into an intermediate structure to avoid that 
problem, and make it a structure of the script language to allow both 
reading as in your examples and modification. This would be the best 
way, but would be a large amount of work. It would be useful in other 
ways though, if one were able to define custom structures. It wouldn't 
need to be a full fledged object oriented system, but that would really 
help.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: <chr### [at] tagpovrayorg>
http://tag.povray.org/

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