Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Some of these are things I have discussed years ago, but I thought it
> could be useful to revive the discussion a bit.
>
> One of the original plans for POV-Ray 4 was to make a complete rehaul
> of the SDL from scratch, making it a lot more versatilve, expressive,
> powerful and faster (via byte-compilation). This would have been a
> completely new input language that's different from the current one
> (but with, perhaps, a backwards compatibility mode to support existing
> scene files.)
>
> I have no idea what the current plans are, but I have the impression
> that the idea of this kind of complete overhaul has been pretty much
> scratched, in favor of simply enhancing the current SDL. (If I'm wrong,
> I'd love to hear about the current development ideas on this.)
>

If we go this way, I would like to see some object-oriented capabilities (e.g.
the ability to create an object and instantiate it multiple times with different
attributes rather than wrapping it in another object { } block)

I would also like to see recursive function definitions, but not knowing how
complex this is, I consider it secondary.

> If we are simply going to keep the current SDL and enhance it, rather
> than create a completely new input language, perhaps a kind of in-between
> solution could be possible.
>

The problem would be that any major enhancement to the existing system is almost
certain to be a rewrite anyway, so why not use a new language (except that it
would completely break old scenes and necessitate rewriting current projects.)

> Snip (History lesson)

the problem I see with this is that not all of us are good at this sort of
thing.  If this is the direction povray were to go, then I think it would be
better to have a plugin system so that, rather than compiling dozens of
unofficial versions of POVRay, we could have One Ring to Rule Them All, and
extra functionality -- even overriding functionality -- could be handled via the
plugin system.

Regards,
A.D.B.

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