| Re: Public domain IDL-PVWAVE ancestor? [message #310] |
Wed, 24 June 1992 11:08  |
isaacman
Messages: 20
Registered: June 1992
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Junior Member |
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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
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| Re: Public domain IDL-PVWAVE ancestor? [message #312 is a reply to message #310] |
Thu, 25 June 1992 08:24  |
pendleton
Messages: 17
Registered: February 1992
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Junior Member |
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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
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| Re: Public domain IDL-PVWAVE ancestor? [message #313 is a reply to message #310] |
Wed, 24 June 1992 12:19 |
eckman
Messages: 8
Registered: February 1991
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Junior Member |
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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
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