It has been a long time since I've made so fundamental(!) and exciting a
discovery as this. Those who already know what source code is may not truly
understand my elation. I feel like I've suddenly climbed to the top of a very
tall mountain--and can finally see the wondrous and vast mountain range
stretching before me, just waiting to be discovered.

The POV-Ray newsgroups are great!

The root of my *long-term* basic misconception (of not realizing that source
code is a simple text file, AND WRITTEN in a text editor) is this: I thought it
needed to be written in some kind of special 'source-code' program or
environment--and linked in some way with C/C++ code libraries or some such, to
make even the writing process work. Admittedly a funny/goofy concept, now that I
understand what the truth is. (I'm leaving out the compiling or interpreting
process, that's a different thing.)

In going back over the info in some of the web resources that I looked at prior
to my post, I see that 'source code as text' *is* mentioned, fairly often. I
probably did understand that part of things, if only in a vague way. But
apparently it wasn't enough to *trigger* an ultimate understanding. Funny thing
is, I never came across anything that said, "...and you can read and write it in
a simple text editor. It's just text, dummy!"  ;-)

Oh, and I'm now making other conceptual connections: I recently bought an
Arduino Uno board. Haven't done much with it yet--but coding for it IS just a
simple matter of writing text, in any old text editor (in a subset of C, which
is then compiled.) But *again* I thought the Arduino code-writing environment
was a 'special case'--purposely made easy for end users, to 'hide the ugly
details.' NOW, I realize that what I'm doing is writing...source code! I don't
think this is actually mentioned in the (one) Arduino book I have.

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