| IDL and RH 9 [ RH Enterprise WS 3 ] [message #36927] |
Fri, 14 November 2003 14:42  |
![""Andrew.Lo is currently offline](theme/default/images/xoffline.png.pagespeed.ic.XRkd1fkXye.png """Andrew.Lo is currently offline")
""Andrew.Lo
Messages: 1
Registered: November 2003
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Junior Member |
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We are running a flavor of Red Hat Linux called Advanced Workstation version 3.
It is an enterprise version, built off of the "free" Red Hat 9.0.
Are there any special tricks to running flexlm under RH 9.0?
Our SysAds are experiencing difficulty getting IDL up-and-running.
Thanks for any help!
*** Please remove OMIT from my return address ***
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| Re: idl and R [message #59642 is a reply to message #36927] |
Fri, 04 April 2008 07:58  |
ben.bighair
Messages: 221
Registered: April 2007
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Senior Member |
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On Apr 4, 5:26 am, rlaybe...@hotmail.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> Does anybody have a summary of the major differences between R and
> idl? I have been using idl for years and have never used R. I
> understand R is statistics orientated, but does it do anything that
> idl can't or does it do it better?
>
Hi,
I have been using R for about a year - this is part of the plan in one
project to replace IDL with ImageJ and R as we move toward open
source software. I still use IDL extensively for other projects. I
haven't hit a real "comfort level" with R, but I have used it as a
general purpose language for working with text files - mostly things
that can be managed as data.frames (simple spreadsheet-like data
structures.) In IDL I had built extensive OO libraries around
handling vectors of simple structures that are quite analogous to data
frames in R.
I, too, thought of R as statistics oriented - and it sure has a lot
going for it in that realm - but my year-into-it-now sense is that it
is better to call it a general purpose language. Keep in mind I
haven't really had much formal training in programming.
Perhaps first and foremost - the user group around R, like this one
around IDL, is very helpful. It is also a lot bigger.
Second - library distribution is a snap in R. The base package of R
has a lot of stuff in it, but sometimes you need to import extra stuff
(like mapping tools for instance). I found it *incredibly easy* to do
so. (This is very much unlike my experience with Python on PPC Mac -
great software but what a mess adding SciPy libraries.)
One thing I haven't noodled out about R is object inheritance. In R
there are two distinct layers of object-oriented programming - the
oldish S3 and the newish S4 styles. I haven't been able to penetrate
the S4 paradigm which I gather is more akin to the OO paradigm in
IDL. So for now I have single files of multiple functions that accept
my data object as an argument. I really couldn't call that OO work
with a heap variable - there is a whole lot of copying arguments going
on. I really miss the simplicity of the IDL OO paradigm.
I haven't jumped into any GUI/Widget stuff with R. That kind of stuff
requires extra libraries (Tk/Tcl, Wx, etc.) which are easy to load,
but each has its own API. Recently a limited "gWidget" system has
been introduced for R that provides a consistent API regardless of
which widget toolkit the user chooses to use underneath. I think this
has the flavor of IDL's widgets (with Motif or Windows underneath) - I
hope to dive into that someday.
I don't pay too much attention to computing power things, but here is
a dated comparison of R with some other languages (but not IDL)...
http://www.sciviews.org/benchmark/index.html
Hope that is helpful.
Ben
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