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Re: IDL 5.4 Stability [message #22386 is a reply to message #22359]

Fri, 10 November 2000 00:00

Liam E. Gumley
Messages: 378
Registered: January 2000

Senior Member

Med Bennett wrote:
> Well, I'm still using 5.0.2, circa mid 1997. It's hard to know what the
> "best" version for one's particular feature needs and stability is. Maybe we
> should have a vote as to what the best version of IDL is, taking into account
> both features and stability. Since I haven't (I hate to admit it) gotten into
> object graphics yet, I don't consider that functionality to be important
> right now.

My experience with writing IMDISP
(http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/~gumley/imdisp.html) taught me it can be
frustrating when you try to support multiple versions of IDL (IMDISP
supports IDL 5.0-5.4). Little things keep creeping in which make it
harder to write version-independent code. For example, the SIZE function
keywords n_dimensions, dimensions, type, tname, and n_elements
introduced in IDL 5.2 make it much easier to determine array
information. Decomposed color handling is also much improved in IDL 5.2,
as is the PRINTER device support. Also, once I made the switch to
square-bracket array syntax, I could never go back to the pre-5.0
parentheses.

For my work-related programming, which is mostly done on UNIX boxes, I
use IDL 5.3 routinely and find it to be reliable, stable, and
worry-free. The transition from IDL 5.1 to 5.2 to 5.3 over the last few
years was painless AFAIK for all IDL users on these systems. I have
installed IDL 5.4 on a couple of NT PCs and it works fine, but we need
to decide how to handle GIF images before we can upgrade our UNIX
systems to 5.4.

Cheers,
Liam.
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/~gumley

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[Message index]

		IDL 5.4 Stability By: davidf on Mon, 06 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: Liam E. Gumley on Fri, 10 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: davidf on Fri, 10 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: Med Bennett on Fri, 10 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: LC's No-Spam Newsread on Fri, 10 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: pit on Thu, 09 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: Mark Hadfield on Wed, 08 November 2000 18:27
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: Nick Bower on Mon, 13 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: Mark Hadfield on Sun, 12 November 2000 13:23
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: noymer on Sun, 12 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: Lyn Doose on Sat, 18 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: Lyn Doose on Thu, 16 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: Lyn Doose on Sun, 12 November 2000 00:00
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: Nick Bower on Sat, 11 November 2000 09:15
		Re: IDL 5.4 Stability By: noymer on Thu, 16 November 2000 18:09

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