| Re: a plea for more reliable mathematical routines [message #17108 is a reply to message #17029] |
Fri, 10 September 1999 00:00   |
Karl Young
Messages: 31
Registered: April 1996
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Member |
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Shoring up current functions may be a hard sell, but if RSI
wants to protect it's user base from erosion it would nonetheless
be a good idea. What if using the highly touted new mine locating
application of IDL, somebody gets blown up because of some of
IDL's sloppy math routines. I'm sure RSI's lawyers have made sure
that they wouldn't be libel for that but nonetheless it wouldn't reflect
very well on their software (I know, I know, that's being a little
dramatic !).
IDL does a lot of things very well so I've accommodated myself to its
shortcomings (e.g. some bad math routines, no opportunity for
taking advantage of the now ubiquitous presence of multiprocessors,...)
but the question is always how long can one hold out. As an example
of accommodation we do most of our sensitive calculations in called
Fortran or C routines. As a result, for us IDL becomes close to
just a portable GUI builder (which it is good at) but there are more
and more competing products that provide that functionality.
> Richard G. French wrote:
>
>> I for one wouldprefer that RSI consolidate their current
>> program structure and shore up the computational and
>> mathematical functions to be competitive with other
>> programs.
>
> I guess the problem is that it's difficult to "sell". Just
> imagine the "IDL Version 10" sales slogan:
>
> Now with accurate numerical functions!
>
> Regards,
>
> Stein Vidar
--
Karl Young
UCSF,VA Medical Center
MRS Unit (114M)
4150 Clement Street
San Francisco, CA 94121
Email: kyoung@itsa.ucsf.edu
Phone: (415) 750-2158 lab
(415) 750-9463 home
FAX: (415) 668-2864
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