SDPSL provides tools for discovering a RenderMan shader's arguments at
runtime in a render-engine neutral way, either with external,
per-shader XML metafiles, or by parsing a shader's source
directly. This significantly simplifies the development of
render-engine-neutral 3D graphics tools, by eliminating linking to
multiple, proprietary parsing libraries (such as libslcargs.a for
BMRT, libsloargs.a for PRMan, etc.) It also allows a shader author to
communicate a much richer set of data to modelling apps in a
standardized way. For example, a shader metafile can specify that a
string argument is intended for use as a texture; a modelling app can
use this information to adjust its UI accordingly.
