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Re: Undocumented functions in IDL [message #83355 is a reply to message #83354]

Thu, 28 February 2013 20:30

wlandsman
Messages: 743
Registered: June 2000

Senior Member

On Thursday, February 28, 2013 10:52:42 PM UTC-5, timoth...@gmail.com wrote:

> ; The reason for doing this is so that if a user has their own
>
> ; STRSPLIT in their local user library, their version will superceed
>
> ; this one. RSI does not recommend this practice, but it is
>
> ; allowed for backwards compatability reasons. ...
>
>
>
> This seems a bit messy.

It's definitely messy, but I am not aware of other examples like it,. Thirteen years ago, RSI was overeager to respond to a user complaint that the new STRSPLIT function name stepped on an existing user function name. The solution of having a STRSPLIT wrapper around a new intrinsic function STRTOK() made things permanently more messy, but the mistake has not been repeated as far as I know.

But the situation could startle a user, unaware of the undocumented STRTOK(), who wrote a simple function

function strtok,x
return,x
end

and then finds

IDL> print,strtok(3)
7

I'll leave the question of why strtok(3) -- or strsplit(3) -- has a value of 7 as an exercise for the reader.

--Wayne

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[Message index]

		Re: Undocumented functions in IDL By: David Fanning on Fri, 01 March 2013 06:08
		Re: Undocumented functions in IDL By: timothyja123 on Fri, 01 March 2013 03:09
		Re: Undocumented functions in IDL By: David Fanning on Thu, 28 February 2013 21:26
		Re: Undocumented functions in IDL By: timothyja123 on Thu, 28 February 2013 21:03
		Re: Undocumented functions in IDL By: timothyja123 on Thu, 28 February 2013 20:55
		Re: Undocumented functions in IDL By: David Fanning on Thu, 28 February 2013 20:39
		Re: Undocumented functions in IDL By: David Fanning on Thu, 28 February 2013 20:33
		Re: Undocumented functions in IDL By: wlandsman on Thu, 28 February 2013 20:30
		Re: Undocumented functions in IDL By: timothyja123 on Thu, 28 February 2013 19:52
		Re: Undocumented functions in IDL By: Craig Markwardt on Fri, 01 March 2013 07:43

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