In article <web.3dcd54f1195c50e47efeba520@news.povray.org>,
 "normdoering" <nor### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

> How about "plugins?" A lot of programs, like Corel Draw, have programs you
> can plug in to Corel to do extra fancy stuff to pictures. I think they're
> ..DLLs...? You write them in basic or C++ or pascal but they would do the
> work of a macro (and more since they could read binary code) and do it
> faster. That way you could avoid the work of turning POV into a compiler.
> In POV you'd call them from the Scene Description File. Wouldn't that be a
> necessary stepping stone towards compiling macros?

That's been discussed as well, often in the same threads (you could also 
do a search for "plugin"). You can't do it in a platform independant 
way, and it introduces other problems, like having to make sure people 
have a plugin before they can render a scene and having to recompile 
plugins as well as the program for different platforms. It would be 
useful, but the cons outweigh the pros at this time.
Another possibility that has been discussed would be to use compiled 
byte-code for a VM. This would be platform independant, but wouldn't 
really have any advantages over an include file that is compiled to byte 
codes when the scene is rendered. It would also be slower than native 
compiled code.

-- 
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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