On Fri, 22 May 1998 14:13:33 +1000, "Stuart Anderson"
<stu### [at] backmeupnetau> wrote:

>POV is not Object Oriented but this is not
>neccessarily a problem.

Contrary to popular belief, POV is object-oriented.  It's just not
written in any of the OO camp's favorite languages.  It takes a bit
more work to achieve OO in C, but remember that the first C++
compilers were just frontends for C compilers.  POV even has virtual
function tables, and has since at least V2.2 (when I started hacking
the code - it probably has been OO for even longer.)

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On Fri, 22 May 1998 00:13:29 -0500, Lonnie Ezell <lez### [at] pcisnet>
wrote:

>As mentioned previously, a cross-platform GUI library exists for C++ that
>creates interfaces for:  Windows 3.1, 95, NT 4.0, almost all varieties of
>UNIX/Linux using Motif, XView & XT, and Mac support to come soon...  Alas,
>that would still leave out the Amiga and DOS platforms... I haven't used this
>so I cannot say how good it works/ doesn't work!  :)

Still, it's a lot easier to port a user interface than to port a
language.  Especially a language that isn't even solid yet.

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Ronald L. Parker wrote:
> 
> Contrary to popular belief, POV is object-oriented.  It's just not
> written in any of the OO camp's favorite languages.

I agree.  It's got polymorphism, inheritance, and encapsulation (three
of the four buzzwords in OOP).  The only thing it doesn't do is
data hiding.  I was truly amazed the first time I saw POV's code.  :)

-Nathan Kopp

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Hey all, I'd love to see this project get underway, so if any who are
interested would send me some mail describing what areas you would
prefer to work on, or what areas of expertise you already have, I'll
work on getting everyone setup with Parts to work on. 

Although, I guess we all need to decide exactly what we want to
accomplish with this project.  Personally, I'd love to see it develop
into something to equal professional packages, like 3D Studio Max!

Also need to know everyone's opinion on what language to use, or if we
should give a couple a try.  I've heard personally support for both Java
and C++.  If all interested parties would tell me their preferences
we'll see if we can't get this thing started!!!

Oh, anyone got any time to keep a web page for this that would allow for
all specs to be posted, along with who's got what part, etc... so that
we can all have easy access to the neccessary info.  Links would also be
good...

Lonnie

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> Jon A. Cruz wrote:
> 
> I don't know anything about Java's capabilities...Can it really provide
the
> speed and power that this sort of program would need?
> 

No, not yet, anyway.

jb

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Jon Berndt wrote:
> 
> > Jon A. Cruz wrote:
> >
> > I don't know anything about Java's capabilities...Can it really provide
> the
> > speed and power that this sort of program would need?
> >
> 
> No, not yet, anyway.
> 
> jb

oops. you missed a quote. That should have been:

Lonnie Ezell wrote:

Since you cut out what I had said and only left what Lonnie said.


Anyway, as far as I've seen, yes it does have the speed and power
needed. Did you check some of the basic applets I mentioned? Also
Java-3D, JDirect, etc.

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...
>Regarding languages, POVray is written in C and seems to have achieved
>cross-platform penetration quite nicely.  Language is obviously NOT an
>issue.
>
...
>Regards Stuart Anderson.
>
>

I would say make it for linux, then compile for mac/powermac/I383/alpha/
etc...   I could be mistaken, but withj linux the most ported of OS's, I do
believe that a simple (   >:o    )   recompile would be all that is needed.
Not everybody has linux, but, considering it is just fine being relegated to
100megs worth of space, most people could get it, an win95, or mac os, or
dos etc.  I am no programmer, but that would seem to be the easiest,
reasonably portable route, at least to me...`

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I'm interested in this project, but probably only as an end user -- i'm
already up to my earlobes with software projects.


Here's my 3 cents.... (it should be two cents, but they pay me too much)

There do exist other, efficient, fairly easy to learn, reliable,
multiplatform languages.    Everyone seems to think that only C, C++ and
Java exist.  Well, yeah, there's FORTRAN and COBOL, too, but of course
they're out.  So let me turn on the light and show you some other good
candidates.  *click!*  Ah, look at these...

Modula-3 is great!  It runs on all major operating systems, makes tight
fast code, and has multi-threading builtin, a very nice feature for an
interactive app such as a modeller.  It's very important to let the user
click on buttons before an image  has finished rendering, and
multi-thread programming is a nice way to handle that, though, I must
mention, not strictly necessary.   There's a standard library of GUI
stuff.  I haven't used it yet, so is it good enough?  I don't know yet. 
Visit www.m3.org.  

Ada-95 is another possibility.  Ada, the orignal version now called
Ada-83, has a bad reputation for being complex, used only in the
military, and has expensive compilers. But Ada-95 is much improved, and
free and cheap compilers exist.  There's a story about how an
inexperienced Ada-95 programmer, with only one week of work, made a
piece of software smaller and faster than some experienced assembly
language programmers who had been working a long time on the same
project.   So don't worry about efficiency.

Another language, I recommend less, is Oberon.  It has portability
problems in theory, but it seems to work OK in practice.  In a
comparison of five OO languages, C++ won the speed of execution contest,
and Oberon came in a close second.  Modula-3 was a close third.  (Ada-95
wasn't in this study.)   (FYI, the other two were Sather, which ran at
half speed, and some obscure interpreted language.)  Very easy to learn
yet can do anything C++ can, though not always as neatly.

Then there is Python, a very elegant language with a GUI interface to Tk
- it's totally portable to any platform.  The language is normally
interpreted, 


As for Java, for one client I experimented with some number-crunching
code and found Java to be too slower than C/C++. Althogh still
acceptable for what we were doing, it will become a problem if our
project ever grows beyond it's original scope.   Yes, clever software
design can make it acceptable, but do you want to spend the time doing
that clever designing and coding?

All the above languages, and Java, have garbage collection.  C++ does
not.  I have seen similar projects fail or die a slow death due to
memory and pointer bugs that couldn't be traced down. Even if fixed,
those kinds of bugs can take up a lot of time, and can lead to
disagreements among programmers who are not all in the same room
everyday.  That's the biggest point against C++, IMHO.  In favor of C++
is that it's very widely used - everyone knows it, and good compilers
are all over the place.

---

My expertise is in math and geometry, so when it's time to work on that
part of the code, I would be interested in following the work more
closely and contributing what I can.

--- 

Daren Scot Wilson
Member, ACM
dar### [at] pipelinecom
www.newcolor.com
--
If you enjoyed this e-mail, please deposit a dime!

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How many times have people started a POV-Ray modeller project?

How many actually got going?   

For those prjects that died or never got started - why?  Lack of
manpower?  Cracked under the weight of overambitious goals?  Coding
bugs?

Especially, what happend to the spurt of interest last May?  

-- 
Daren Scot Wilson
Member, ACM
dar### [at] pipelinecom
www.newcolor.com
--
If you enjoyed this e-mail, please deposit a dime!

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Why doesn't someone write a garbage collector for C++? I'm not a
programmer or I would do it myself.

Daren Scot Wilson wrote:

<snip>
> All the above languages, and Java, have garbage collection.  C++ does
> not.  I have seen similar projects fail or die a slow death due to
> memory and pointer bugs that couldn't be traced down. Even if fixed,
> those kinds of bugs can take up a lot of time, and can lead to
> disagreements among programmers who are not all in the same room
> everyday.  That's the biggest point against C++, IMHO.  In favor of C++
> is that it's very widely used - everyone knows it, and good compilers
> are all over the place.

-- 
Bryan M. Smith
bms### [at] teleportcom
 
The nice thing about Windows is - It does not just crash, it displays a
dialog box and lets you press 'OK' first.

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