Shay <Sha### [at] cccc> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>
> >
> > Well, then let's remove every "convenient" thing there is in povray and
> > make it as hard to use as possible.
>
> The point on which we disagree is the nature of convenience or
> usability. The relationship between feature expansion and usability has
> been argued a thousand times - there's no point in continuing to repeat
> it. If you think a large expansion of the (already buggy) procedural
> portion of POV SDL is the most convenient (to users) way to accomplish a
> job like format conversion, then so be it. I think you're nuts. I say,
> learn a little Perl (that's what it's there for), or even better,
> hard-code format conversion into the POV source code. I guess that
> sounds nutty to you.
>
>   -Shay

I have to say I like the direction Warp wants SDL to go...  Most of my POV
coding is in the procedural portion and there are a lot MORE things I'd
like to be able to do directly in SDL. That's what makes POV-Ray useful to
me as opposed to *having* to turn to external things.  The idea of making
source SDL which is usable to anybody who has POV-Ray is appealing.  When a
project starts to require multiple languages, the number of people who'll be
able to use it starts to drop.

My thinking and my hope for in an updated SDL are largely what Warp
mentioned.  Specifically, more use of the dot operator (even adding .xy
..xyz etc to for vectors), user definable data structures again with more
use of dot operators, more control, i/o for arbitrary binary files, and
better string manipulation.

One really specific thing I'd like:  The currently-'experimental' but often
used feature, splines, I think would benefit from a new syntax - I think
that splines
should be treated as a basically/almost-normal array of 4d vectors.
MySpline(Value) would return a 3d vector point along a spline like is done
now.  MySpline[Value] would return a 4d vector control point of the given
array-position in the form <x,y,z,t> where t is the float-position along
the spline's length.  MySpline[Value].xyz would return a 3d version of the
control point. Transformations would apply to all values on the 'spline
array' except for the t values unless specifically called for by use of dot
operators.

Charles

PS (Woohoo! I was able to log on today from home with my high latency
connection!)

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