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Re: IDL interpreter questions - can someone (D.Fanning) explain - TIA [message #25173 is a reply to message #25095] |
Fri, 18 May 2001 22:58  |
Ken Mankoff
Messages: 158 Registered: February 2000
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Senior Member |
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On Sat, 19 May 2001, Mark Rivers wrote:
> mankoff@lasp.colorado.edu wrote in message ...
>
>> Now its true that I don't know anything about the actual IDL
>> implementation (though I have written RPC code for IDL). I actually
>> answered based upon the behavior of IDL, not the implementation. That is,
>> functions won't modify the callers variables, and neither will procedures,
>> unless you add the 'return'.
>
> That's not true. Here's the proof:
> So the procedure and the function both modified arguments passed to them.
>
apparently you are right, what I said wasn't true. Wow. I stand doubly
corrected *and* get to learn a new feature of IDL I never realized
existed, all in one day (good thing its only 11:54pm in my time-zone :).
I've been coding in IDL for almost three years, and I really thought that
procedures and functions behavior could be modified by use of a return
statement. Furthermore, almost every procedure I've written has a "return"
as its 2nd-to-last line, and an "end" as its last line. I just read the
IDL help and this is completely redundant!
Sorry for any confusion I may have started to spread, especially to the
pour soul who originally started this thread. Thanks Mark & JD for
teaching me some obvious stuff about the language I should have realized
long ago.
The really wierd part, is that i could swear I once tracked down and fixed
a bug with a return... i'll have to see if i can remember what and where
that was, and figure out what the *real* bug was...
-k.
--
Ken Mankoff
LASP://303.492.3264
http://lasp.colorado.edu/~mankoff/
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