Thomas writes:
>My initial fear, and the reason I brought this up early, was that
>by delaying the decision to incorporate a language, or even by not
>standardizing on *one*, that developers of VRML objects and scenes
>would write for the "lowest common denominator", and that some of
>the more interesting aspects of this would be lost.
>From the history of the Net, I suspect this won't be a long-term
problem. Even if multiple prospective standards emerge, the Net
tends to wind up standardizing on one before terribly long. And
this stuff is just too potentially cool for most people to limit
themselves to LCD for long. (The Net loves nothing better than a
new toy...)
Paul writes:
>In our experience with Geomview, this decoupling is very useful.
>There are Geomview modules written in Perl, awk, sh, TCL, and other
>scripting languages, in addition to compiled languages like C. Each
>language is useful in its domain. (The animated clock, for example,
>is an awk script.)
Very, very good point, and one I'd forgotten. For those who haven't
dug into Geomview, I should briefly explain the apparent contradiction
between what I said before and what Paul's saying. Geomview is, indeed,
driven by a simple Lispoid language. However, the code in that language
can be generated "on the fly" by external programs (and, I gather,
usually is). So, for example, you can have a C program communicating
to Geomview through this Lisp, sending Lisp commands and receiving
data in that form.
As I said, excellent point. This may well be the best medium between
the various arguments: a nice easy-to-interpret language, which you
could send statically *or* generate dynamically through outside programs.
It would probably satisfy both our short- and long-term needs decently
well. I like it...
And Mike, if this is what you were saying, and I wasn't understanding
you correctly, my apologies...
-- Justin
Once again reminded that, although I
don't adore OOGL, I *do* think Geomview
has some very clever ideas...
Random Quote du Jour:
"He was calling me a machine, but since he undoubtably defines himself as
a human being, I shall choose to accept that as more of a complement than
anything else."
-- Avon