Messages from Usenet group comp.lang.idl-pvwave, compiled by Paulo Penteado
Re: Announcing GDL 0.7, now with PLOT command
In article <c1v3mi$5kg$1@news.riken.go.jp>, Marc Schellens <m_schellens@hotmail.com> writes: |> GDL - GNU Data Language, an IDL 6.0 compatible incremental compiler. |> Version: 0.7 |> [snip] |> Check it out! Cool -- it works. You need the GNU scientific libraries gsl, and the plplot plotting package installed. (Although the configure scripe checks for these it doesn't exit with an error status, so if you do ./configure && make && make install you get a compile-time error) Debian testing users will need to install the separate plplot9-driver-xwin package for the plots to actually work. I shall begin testing GDL on some real-world code .... roll on contour! And remember that a few years ago, the main implementation of S was S-Plus, while R was a toy. R has now taken much of S-Plus's mindshare. OTOH, octave has stagnated as a clone of a very old version of Matlab. Which will be the main implementation of IDL five years' time: RSI's or GDL? Hugh -- ============S=u=p=p=o=r=t===D=e=b=i=a=n===http://www.debian. org========== Dr. Hugh C. Pumphrey, School of GeoSciences The University of Edinburgh, EDINBURGH EH9 3JZ, Scotland OBDisclaimer: The views expressed herein are mine, not those of UofE. ============================================================ =============
On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, H C Pumphrey wrote: > I shall begin testing GDL on some real-world code .... roll on contour! > And remember that a few years ago, the main implementation of S was S-Plus, > while R was a toy. R has now taken much of S-Plus's mindshare. OTOH, octave > has stagnated as a clone of a very old version of Matlab. Which will be the > main implementation of IDL five years' time: RSI's or GDL? There have been open-source APL and J interpreters, but my impression is that commercial interpreters are more widely used. Octave wasn't just a clone, it introduced some ideas (structures) that became part of real Matlab. Now Matlab has incorported ideas from octave and many other extensions to the orginal language. R addressed fundamental problems with S-Plus in student lab environments on multi-user machines (it allowed you to limit the memory a user could allocate so one user couldn't monopolize all the resources of a large server). I suspect this meant that a large number of S-Plus users ported software to R for use in courses and then found it suitable for "every day" use. I started using R for statistical summaries and reports because it has excellent support for dealing with missing values as well as the statistical tools. Recently I've been doing more things in R because they can be used by more people than if they are done in IDL, but GDL could reverse that trend. The grad students and recent PhD's I encounter generally have experience with Matlab. A few have used R and a very few have used IDL. GDL would need some compelling advantage to get it into eduational institutions before it can have the level of success of R. -- George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>