| Re: IDL opinions [message #2154 is a reply to message #2153] |
Tue, 07 June 1994 07:37   |
thompson
Messages: 584
Registered: August 1991
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Senior Member |
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super295@pop.uky.edu (Robert G. Buice, Jr.) writes:
> I have a demo of IDL an am considering buying it. I currently use
> Speakeasy and Mathematica and am very happy with Speakeasy, but not
> with support from the Speakeasy company. I want to replace Speakasy
> with Mathematica, Matlab, or IDL and was wondering if I could get some
> opinions. I want to do number crunching and I hear that IDL is mostly
> imaging software. Actually I am very happy with Mathematica, but it
> seems to solve the same preoblems as speakasy 100X more slowly on the
> same machine. Thanks
It depends on what you mean by "number crunching". I don't think it's fair to
say that IDL is mostly for imaging, although it does it very well. It would
fairer to say that IDL is designed and optimized for working with scientific
data in all forms. It's highly flexible and easy to program in.
I've never run across Speakeasy, but my impression of Mathematica and Matlab
are that they are more optimized for expressing mathematical relationships than
IDL is, but less for working with real (i.e. grungy) data. It all depends on
the kinds of problems you want to solve.
In terms of performance, in my experience IDL puts very little overhead on a
calculation AS LONG AS ONE PROGRAMS IT PROPERLY. The secret is avoiding loops.
Under many circumstances one can avoid explicit loops completely.
Hope this helps,
Bill Thompson
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