In article <41db3709$1@news.povray.org>, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> 
wrote:

> > I don't know much about Tcl, but I doubt it would be as convenient as a 
> > special purpose language. Simply having a built-in syntax for specifying 
> > vectors is a huge advantage.
> 
> You can write OO-ness in Tcl, entirely in Tcl. Many of Tcl's control 
> structures are written in Tcl.  Adding a vector type to Tcl is *trivial*.

After looking at some examples online, I begin to see...it's one of 
those "mutable" languages I was talking about.


> Yes. That's called an "extensible" language, and includes Tcl, FORTH, 
> and Lisp. Lisp still has the ((())) syntax to deal with, FORTH has the 
> postscript, and Tcl has very few drawbacks in this regard. Altho, as you 
> mention, Tcl expression syntax can be a little bit ugly, just a tad.

Sounds like we're talking about the same thing, just that I don't know 
anything about Tcl.


> Tcl, I'd venture. :)
> 
> Mind, Tcl isn't really good at math as such, but on the other hand since 
> math isn't technically built into the language, that would probably be 
> pretty easy to improve.

Well, I'll have to put Tcl near the top of my list of alternative 
existing languages. However, I'd still prefer a custom one, for the 
control over architecture and reduction in dependency, and more clear 
responsibility for bugfixes and such. Based in spirit on languages like 
Tcl, but not in actual code. Writing a language parser isn't all that 
difficult, it's mainly tedious after you get basic expression parsing 
done...and once it's done, adding or minor modification is pretty easy.

And, if it's not designed for it from the start, making the VM 
high-performance for things like shaders would probably be quite 
difficult. Going from dynamic dispatch of an operator method to 
performing a VM operation on a numeric primitive type is quite a change. 
Something like overlapping it with a far more static language...

-- 
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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