William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

> The implication here, if leaning on the local / global dictionaries to
> decide things in your scene, is that the conditional test results will
> change as you move code about in the hierarchy of files. Some of this we
> might expect, while other behavior very likely not.


Hi Bill,

It looks like you may be finally touching on the elusive bug that has plagued me
in a number of "recent" projects - where I was having problems with certain
macro results not being defined, especially (it seemed) when I was running those
macros from within include files.

I'm not sure if I posted full code for those examples or not, and it's a bit
worrisome, since it suggests that more such things may be lurking in the parser
- and even more worrisome - that there may be some fundamentally flawed
logic/implementation in the way the entire parser is structured (aside from the
obvious things that we've discussed over the past decade(s) ;) )

I can't recall all of the various instances where I've run into these problems,
but certainly it was a recurring theme in the kumiko triangles project:

https://news.povray.org/povray.advanced-users/thread/%3Cweb.64209db9e0deeaab1f9dae3025979125%40news.povray.org%3E/


I've experimented with tracking the nesting level of the SDL code in the past,
and maybe there's a way to make that visible to the SDL from within source
without slowing things down / adding too much overhead.

Also, I'm wondering if in your povr branch, you could try addressing the highly
ambiguous "#end" directive and switching over to #endif #endfor etc.

Since you're coding source (in C?  c++?), it would be interesting to hear your
"ramblings" on the types of data structures and code-flow directives we're
currently missing in SDL that you think would be of use.

Great work tracking down these parse errors.   They can seriously challenge
one's sanity when trying to debug scenes in SDL.

- BW

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