| IDL alternatives? [message #4433] |
Wed, 31 May 1995 00:00 |
zowie
Messages: 9
Registered: March 1994
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Junior Member |
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Well, I got tired of buggy behavior from my old copy of IDL (3.5.0 for
Ultrix) (it's dumping core again), and called RSI to get a price on
the update to 4.0. I've been using IDL for about six months, enough
time to be excited by the functionality, and horrified at the 1970s
programmer interface.
They told me it would cost over $1,000 per year for maintenance (they
apparently recently split tech support off from "standard maintenance"
and now charge extra for it). Talk about highway robbery! Now I know
how Richard Stallman felt -- between their swap leaks, stripped
binaries (so you can't even link in yer own malloc to fix the swap
leaks), core dumps, and oppressive licensing tactics, I'm of half a
mind to implement a clean version of the language and give it away
free to people who are stuck with large IDL libraries. I certainly
don't want to submit to what I perceive as (at best) extremely poor PR
or (at worst) addict-and-screw tactics.
Anyway, before taking such a drastic step, I'm interested in finding out
just how compatible PV/WAVE is with existing (old) IDL code. Does anyone
have experience with both packages? (I checked the FAQ before posting...)
At this point, I'm basically trying to decide between porting my
libraries to 'C' while they're still small enough to manage, finding
an existing replacement interpreter (PV-WAVE?), or implementing an
interpreter subset. Comments welcomed.
--
Craig DeForest
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