| Re: RSI response to CONTOUR problems/questions. [message #1473 is a reply to message #1452] |
Wed, 29 September 1993 09:37  |
rfinch
Messages: 51
Registered: March 1991
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Member |
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>>>> > On Mon, 27 Sep 1993 16:31:20 GMT, info@rsinc.com (Research Systems Inc.) said:
RSI> Nntp-Posting-Host: 192.160.108.6
RSI> Although we do not
RSI> normally respond to postings on the news group
Please reconsider this. I have been very impressed the last few days
with the comp.soft-sys.matlab group because MathWorks, a maker of a
commercial Matlab, has several of their people responding to questions
posted to that group.
RSI> In response to Patrick Ryan's (NASA/GSFC) requests:
> 1) to "Get rid of /MAX_VALUE. put in code to do real handling of
> missing data."
RSI> Ralph Finch (Calif. Dept of Water), and Bill Thompson (NASA/GSFC) also
RSI> expressed this opinion. Part of the IDL philosophy is that since IDL
RSI> is a full feature language, it is better to solve such problems using
RSI> IDL, rather than jam in special purpose features.
Excuse me. Missing values are not a special feature in real data. We
have 10 million + data points, and probably 10%-20% are missing. They
are so common that they should be handled cleanly and easily. That
includes not only plotting them properly, but all routines where
possible should have the MISS_VALUE= keyword and deal with it:
statistical routines, fourier transforms, etc.
The 'trivial' way to deal with missing values, as given in the
example, certainly works but is annoying to have to do once; a real
time-waster to have to do 20 times in 13,000 lines of code (our
situation).
Anyway, how is MISS_VALUE any more a special feature than MAX_VALUE?
--
Ralph Finch 916-653-8268 voice
rfinch@water.ca.gov 916-653-6077 fax
Any opinions expressed are my own; they do not represent the DWR
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