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Subscripting arrays. [message #84150] Thu, 02 May 2013 12:40 Go to next message
Russell Ryan is currently offline  Russell Ryan
Messages: 122
Registered: May 2012
Senior Member
So someone showed me this and I'm trying to wrap my head around it. Sorry if it's already posted, I didn't know how to begin to search The Group for it...


Create an array:

a = intarr(3)

Using IDL 8, subscript with 4 (ie. an index that's too large and should be out of bounds)

a[4]=3

Obviously, this crashes.

Conversely subscript with a negative index:

a[-1]=2

does what you expect.

But, now subscript the array, WITH an array:

a[[4]]=2

voila. It works, and simply truncates to the last element of the array... Spooky. Now do that with a negative index:

a[[-1]]=4

Like before, it works. But now, it doesn't wrap the index, but rather truncates to the first element of the array.

Hmm.. I can't tell if this is the designed behavior, because I have a hard time describing it --- it's easier to show it.


All the best,
Russell
Re: Subscripting arrays. [message #84211 is a reply to message #84150] Mon, 06 May 2013 06:37 Go to previous message
Jeremy Bailin is currently offline  Jeremy Bailin
Messages: 618
Registered: April 2008
Senior Member
On 5/3/13 4:09 PM, rryan@stsci.edu wrote:
> A ha. Sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure why it's "designed" this way, but c'est la vie. I passed your response on to the friend, who groaned. We nearly said (in unison), I never pay much attention to those compiler options.
>
> Thanks!
> Russell

There are times when I think this is the best feature ever. There are
also times when I swear profusely at it. What would be really cool would
be if you could switch it on and off for a particular indexing operation
at runtime, but I'm sure that would be a nightmare to implemenet!

-Jeremy.
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