Purpose
Like most scripting languages, COFFEE is used to extend or modify the functionality of the host software. This technique is preferable to writing a so-called plug-in module using a traditional language such as C for a number of reasons, among them:
- The scripting language implicitly handles memory management on the user's behalf, where C does not;
- The language interpreter does not require programs to be compiled as a separate step before they can be used;
- A purpose-built scripting language can be tailored so that it lends itself to its intended usage. For example, COFFEE has built-in mathematical functions that are necessary for 3D graphics programming.
There are several different aspects of CINEMA 4D's operation that can be customised using COFFEE scripts, notably additions to the user interface and extensions for reading and writing new file formats and creating texture shaders. Almost all the main functionality of the application can be accessed from a COFFEE program, and so customised features can look and behave much like those supplied as standard.
Read more about this topic: COFFEE (Cinema 4D)
Famous quotes containing the word purpose:
“A major misunderstanding of child rearing has been the idea that meeting a child’s needs is an end in itself, for the purpose of the child’s mental health. Mothers have not understood that this is but one step in social development, the goal of which is to help a child begin to consider others. As a result, they often have not considered their children but have instead allowed their children’s reality to take precedence, out of a fear of damaging them emotionally.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“For the purpose of knowledge, one must know how to use that inner current that draws us to a thing, and then the one that, after a time, draws us away from it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)