> When porting a software, user interface is often painful. Furthermore, Povray's
> user interface is essentially a code editor. It could be replaced by any serious
> code editor, such Eclipse.
>  From my point of view, there is no reason to maintain the Povray's user
> interface.

For most Windows users I suspect setting up Eclipse is not something 
they particularly want to do. In the past I've been forced to use it for 
Java stuff and it totally sucks compared to eg the Visual Studio IDE. If 
anything the POV editor should be improved and upgraded with things like 
context-sensitive auto-complete, inline help etc. I know Mike Raiford 
was working on a POV editor based on the Visual Studio shell and it 
looked very promising.

> If we can isolate the renderer code, we could interface it with languages such
> Perl, Python, PHP... All the parsing and the hard work would be handled by the
> (Perl, Python, PHP) interpreter. Furthermore, we could use the entire collection
> of libraries available for these languages.

You can write SDL files from your own code in whatever language you 
want. This is pretty common when generating complex scenes based on 
simulations etc.

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