@Curt:
I get the sense that you don't want to budge until you are convinced. That is fair, but you have structured the questions in a way that makes it nearly impossible to be convinced. Any of the answers or suggestions that have been presented are interpreted in the most diminished way possible.
Ah... interesting. No, you're completely misunderstanding my position.
I've learned that in evaluating novel ideas, it makes sense that one party assumes a critical perspective, the other party tries to 'sell' the idea. The idea is that through critical questions and the resulting need to argue a position, an initially vague notion of 'wouldn't it be better' can be sharpened to an idea that avoids the worst pitfalls up-front and is actually convincing. Or not. So my idea here is to get an accurate picture of what the advantages would be such that I can form an educated position.
I do know that usually adding more things into the fray, making more independent components to talk to each other generically leads to unexpected consequences. I've seen that so often that nobody can really convince me that we won't see this as down side. The relevant question for me is - will this be balanced (or even more than balanced) by advantages?
See, knowing hardly anything, it could be that all this is just about familiarity - people are familiar with a certain syntax, so they just don't want to adapt to something new. Fair enough, but wouldn't convince me. It could be that this is about a misconception of what are performance bottlenecks, like the recurring theme that dds textures render faster - in this case, the misconception should be cleared up. It could be that this is about something genuinely useful. People frequently argue all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons.
So yeah, I think it'd be a good thing if someone would convince me, because then he'd be forced to think hard about pros and cons himself and probably eventually make a better implementation that way. There's a reason that proposals get evaluated before they're done in reality as well. This isn't fundamentally about convincing me - but think - if you can't even theoretically, in a vision sketched, get me excited by the potential - how good is your idea really?
(Finally - you do make some very good points with complex AP logic - that was actually the kind of case I was hoping to see.)
@abassign:
I think it's important to come off from the couple XML-NASAL, which proved difficult to manage for large projects, such as SU15 or F15 etc ...
I am actually managing one of these 'huge' projects and I don't see the difficulty you're mentioning. It's (yet another) red herring.
You can write good and efficient code in Nasal, in GLSL, in C++ or in Python, and you can write a poorly structured design in any of those as well.
Frankly, it's clear from several of your postings that you don't have any hands-on experience in rendering - and yet you frequently feel the need to comment how it 'really' should be done. I've never seen your 'huge' aircraft project - and yet you feel the need to lecture the people who do them how they 'really' work. It's clear from your examples that you're not aware how and where performance bottlenecks arise in FG - and yet you frequently point out what 'really' needs to be done to remove those. At the same time, when these things are explained to you by whom ever, it doesn't seem to have any effect.
This is an attitude I find personally very problematic. I can respect people whose assertions are backed up by hands-on experiences or theoretical knowledge, even if there is scant evidence and even if their experiences they differ from mine - but I can't respect such off-hand assertions of 'evident truth' backed up by nothing.
You're replacing evidence by wishful thinking and that's never a good idea.
Let's see how the Conservative Party, currently in power, responds to my proposal, I'm curious;) and I also hope that it can avoid continuing its offensive manner of analyzing the problem.
If you find it offensive that people point out to you where you are wrong, you should perhaps not participate in such a discussion. If you would care to bolster your proposal by more evidence and less wishful thinking, you'd find a warmer reception.