Editing POV-Ray SDL project (section)

== Problem description ==

However, all is not well in paradise. You see, while the SDL's programming capabilities are both simple and fairly flexible, what they are '''not''' is ''expressive'' or ''efficient''.

The SDL provides no way to define new datatypes. The only data you can handle is floating-point reals, character strings, various sizes of vectors (of floating-point reals) and arbitrary-size multi-dimensional arrays of any of the above.

Also, the SDL is not a very compute-efficient programming language. POV-Ray is really designed to be a high-performance ''renderer'', and not a high-performance ''interpreter''. It is not uncommon for some scenes to take longer to parse than to render. The 'programming' constructs in the SDL essentially work by injecting tokens into the scene parser. In particular, calling code in another source file causes that file to be repeatedly opened and parsed.