In article <41db0035@news.povray.org>, Sil### [at] gmxde says...
> I don't understand that one. Why should people _need_ to learn new 
> languages. If there is just a frontend that is able to create SDL code 
> they'd still have SDL code to work with. They won't be able to 
> effectively modify it but they aren't now either in many cases (those 
> that are just to hard to be treated with common SDL).
> 
Except that the frontend is entirely unneeded if you extend the SDL to 
support things properly in the first place. Moray does a decent, but not 
complete job of acting as a front end and even solves some problems, in a 
general way, like animation that are troublesome with pure SDL. But it 
falls short of supporting some basic things, like being able to link a 
light source to an object, so they move together, let alone some more 
complex things. The more abstraction you put between the core functions 
and the user, the more limited you end up making their options and the 
more the perception becomes, "That program can't do X". Of course, some 
times, like with media for subsurface scattering, the 'correct' solution 
can actually have the opposite result, making it so complicated to use 
the feature that the abstracted simulation of it might be preferable, but 
that is generally a far more rare situation. Any abstraction shouldn't be 
in the language someone uses to manually edit things in most cases, but 
more like Moray, when the abstraction is to a simpler representation of 
what it really being done. XML or other structures can't improve the 
ability to see that, it only obfuscates the actual process or nature of 
the objects in it even more.

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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