Messages from Usenet group comp.lang.idl-pvwave, compiled by Paulo Penteado
In article <1992Jun24.004325.4613@cs.yale.edu>, zador-anthony@CS.YALE.EDU (Tony Zador) writes... > Rumor has it that IDL and PVWAVE share a common ancestor, sometime > about a decade ago. Is this true? If so, was it public domain? If so, > where might i obtain it? > The common ancestor is IDL itself. The way a PV sales rep explained it to me, the Precision Visuals people originally contracted with RSI to enhance and market IDL; the terms, however, allowed them to buy the IDL source code at the end of the contract period. (Sounds like a crazy move; I presume that RSI must have really needed the money at the time.) Anyway, the PV people exercised that option and have since gone their own way with the IDL source code, adding to it and modifying it according to their own marketing needs. So, no, you can't obtain it. Rich Isaacman NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
In article <1992Jun24.004325.4613@cs.yale.edu> zador-anthony@CS.YALE.EDU (Tony Zador) writes: > Rumor has it that IDL and PVWAVE share a common ancestor, sometime > about a decade ago. Is this true? If so, was it public domain? If so, > where might i obtain it? > In the pre-VAX IDL (xidl) days, there was a PDP-developed version of IDL that ran on some of the PDP and VAX machines that I used while a grad student at Colorado. This would have been prior to around 1982 when the native-model VAX IDL was released. Whether this PDP version of idl is actually public domain is not something I have the answer to. Given the amazing things that the present incarnation of idl is capable of, I doubt that you would want to use it even it were freely available. Richard Eckman NASA Langley Research Center Hampton, VA eckman@dobson.larc.nasa.gov
In article <1992Jun24.191911.21990@news.larc.nasa.gov>, eckman@eos1.larc.nasa.gov (Richard Eckman) writes: > In article <1992Jun24.004325.4613@cs.yale.edu> zador-anthony@CS.YALE.EDU (Tony Zador) writes: >> Rumor has it that IDL and PVWAVE share a common ancestor, sometime >> about a decade ago. Is this true? If so, was it public domain? If so, >> where might i obtain it? >> > Whether this PDP version of idl is actually public domain is not something > I have the answer to. Given the amazing things that the present incarnation > of idl is capable of, I doubt that you would want to use it even it were > freely available. > Despite the numerous value-added enhancements that are available in the current incarnation of IDL, some of the most basic attractive abilities of IDL on VMS were sacrificed when the code was ported from Fortran/MACRO to C. First off, IDL's math routines are SLOWER now than they used to be, and most irritatingly, the memory management under C leaves much to be desired, as has been discussed earlier in this group. RSI has attracted new customers with its fine image processing code, X widgets, and multi-platform support, but at the expense of those of us who bought IDL early on, primarily for its number-crunching abilities, "clean" virtual memory management, backward-compatability with Fortran user interfaces, and dynamic image linking. Perhaps now that RSI has put considerable effort porting to standard C, they'll take some more time and put value-added platform-specific hooks into the code to take advantage of the individual machines' strengths. (Sorry, I just got another "insufficient core" error from the malloc statement, after working in IDL for an hour.;-) Jim Pendleton, SysMgr., etc. Compton Gamma Ray Observatory/OSSE Dept. Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern U. pendleton@ossenu.astro.nwu.edu