"jr" <cre### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> hi,
>
> "Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> > ...
> > Silly idea:   certain image formats have header sections where you can embed
> > virtually anything.   Would it be possible to have POV-Ray store scene files in
> > an image file format, with the SDL embedded in the header?  Not sure where I was
> > going with this a second ago - but just thinking about such a thing might spark
> > some new ideas about structuring scene, includes, etc.
>
> look at attached with:
>
>   $ hexdump -C hu_8.png | less

Well, not exactly.   I think I wrote that on my way out to work, so it was just
a short brain-dump.

What I was actually thinking was that POV-Ray could use an image format as the
actual file format for storing the SDL text, and the editor could extract it
from that, display it, allow for editing, and re-save into the image file
wrapper.

Why do this:
I guess the idea was that since POV-Ray already has the ability to
parse/interpret image file formats already, it might be possible to somehow
embed a series of text files into the image header - like includes, etc and use
it kind of like a zip file.

Also, then we could have the image and the code that generated it all in one
place, so they aren't separated and lost/confused.

It might also be possible to implement security by obscurity, to protect certain
parts of code that an author might not want users casually messing with.  If you
really wanted to edit that code, you'd have to work for it, rather than just
"Ooops!  I broke it!"

But binary copy, hexdump, Tcp, and other tools might provide a sort of
functional work-around / proof of concept to see how a suite of files could
potentially be used ....

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