In article <41d98ce0$1@news.povray.org>,
 Bernd Fuhrmann <Sil### [at] gmxde> wrote:

> What should be thought of is this: There are a lot of good programming 
> languages out there: C/C++, Java, Pascal/Delphi, JavaScript, XML, 
> Scheme, Prolog, PHP, and so on. Why does POVRay need to have it's very 
> own programming language that is compatible to none of the existing 
> ones? The only thing that POVRay needs to do is this (simplified):

Simplicity. None of those really cut it.


> So one has to ask: How can I get all that date in a clean and easy way 
> from all kinds of different sources to the renderer? What sources might 
> that be?

Primarily hand-written scene files. XML is basically useless for that, 
those other languages are usually just very awkward, and require 
knowledge of a complex programming language. The existing SDL is 
limited, but it's also simple. People can do substantial things while 
knowing very little about programming.
Then there's maintenance issues...keeping up with updates to the 
language, changing the language if the developers take it in a direction 
that makes it less useful to POV-Ray, etc. Plus debugging someone else's 
code base.

For someone with experience in those languages, learning the POV-Ray SDL 
shouldn't be a challenge, but the POV language will be better at what it 
needs to do.


> Cool. Where do I have to go to join development team? #4 doesn't seem to 
> be under development. Or is it? Couldn't find any info, any invitation, 
> anything.

That was probably because you weren't invited. POV 4 isn't even 
partially released yet, but that you can't see it doesn't mean there 
hasn't been any design or code written. You can write and distribute 
modifications as allowed by the license, but you'll have to work with 
3.6 for now.

-- 
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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