(I first posted this message to povray.general, then I realized it should be
there, so here I am...)

Mmm, I though PoV-Win editor would perfectly handle the language...
Obviously, CodeMax isn't able to manage nested comments.
Granted, it is not obvious.
I still want to make a PoV-Ray lexer for SciTE, and nested states are hard
to manage because you have to allocate a lexing style per level of nesting.
That's why I will probably limit the nesting management to 3 levels, should
be enough for most cases.
I also miss the matching (soft) braces highlighting and jumping...
Oh well, I learn some more PoV-Ray syntax and I will do it! :-) Trying to
add code completion, tooltips, and other goodies...

On a different topic:
The manual states, on the 6.1.7 chapter, that backslashes in strings must be
doubled. That makes sense, because these characters have special meaning,
like in most other languages.
But I tried the SPX scene from http://www.hoboes.com/html/NetLife/POV/SPX/
and I naively replaced the path of the image_map by one from my disk:
  image_map {
    gif "E:\_PhiLho\Images\greatwave.gif"
    once
   }
And it worked!
I suppose PoV-Ray is smart here, because it knows it is a path, so there
cannot be special characters like \n or ". But I am not sure. Well, I will
double my backslashes, just to be on the light side of programming :-) Er,
just to be consistent...

Actually, if I write:
#declare thePath = "E:\_PhiLho\Images\greatwave.gif";
  image_map {
    gif thePath
    once
   }
PoV-Ray complains on the declaration line: "Illegal escape sequence in
string".
So indeed it is soft for the newbies and knows when a string is a path
string...
That's a smart guy... :-) But since it is undocumented (or I missed it, I
haven't read the whole manual yet) I will avoid it.

While I am here, I want to complain about another problem ;-)
Take a nice SDL signature from a message. Create a new buffer in PoV-Win
(Ctrl+N). Paste the code snippet.
PoV-Ray asks: "File 'Untitled' has changed - save ?"
Click on No.
You got the message: "Possible Scene File Parser Initialization Error: Could
not find file 'OBJECT.POV'
Scene File Parser Initialization Error: Cannot open input file."

I believe that OBJECT.POV is the default file to render when none is given
on the command line. I naively though that PoV-Ray was able to render a
scene from memory, obviously it needs to read it from a file. OK, that's
fine. So I believe that when we click on No, we should actually cancel the
rendering. Or even better, the No button should be disabled, like in other
contexts.
Actually, if I click on the checkbox to avoid having the above question
asked furthermore in the session, on similar circonstance PoV-Ray directly
jumps to the Save dialog box. If I cancel it, the rendering is cancelled.
Better behavior here...

Is there a way to permanently say to PoV-Ray to save the scene before
rendering? Ie. to avoid this question each time a session is restarted.

-- #=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=# --
Philippe Lhoste (Paris -- France)
Professional programmer and amateur artist
http://jove.prohosting.com/~philho/

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