| Re: Public domain IDL-PVWAVE ancestor? [message #312 is a reply to message #310] |
Thu, 25 June 1992 08:24   |
pendleton
Messages: 17
Registered: February 1992
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Junior Member |
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In article <1992Jun24.191911.21990@news.larc.nasa.gov>,
eckman@eos1.larc.nasa.gov (Richard Eckman) writes:
> In article <1992Jun24.004325.4613@cs.yale.edu> zador-anthony@CS.YALE.EDU (Tony Zador) writes:
>> Rumor has it that IDL and PVWAVE share a common ancestor, sometime
>> about a decade ago. Is this true? If so, was it public domain? If so,
>> where might i obtain it?
>>
> Whether this PDP version of idl is actually public domain is not something
> I have the answer to. Given the amazing things that the present incarnation
> of idl is capable of, I doubt that you would want to use it even it were
> freely available.
>
Despite the numerous value-added enhancements that are available in the
current incarnation of IDL, some of the most basic attractive abilities of
IDL on VMS were sacrificed when the code was ported from Fortran/MACRO to
C. First off, IDL's math routines are SLOWER now than they used to be, and
most irritatingly, the memory management under C leaves much to be desired,
as has been discussed earlier in this group.
RSI has attracted new customers with its fine image processing code, X widgets,
and multi-platform support, but at the expense of those of us who bought IDL
early on, primarily for its number-crunching abilities, "clean" virtual memory
management, backward-compatability with Fortran user interfaces, and dynamic
image linking. Perhaps now that RSI has put considerable effort porting to
standard C, they'll take some more time and put value-added platform-specific
hooks into the code to take advantage of the individual machines' strengths.
(Sorry, I just got another "insufficient core" error from the malloc statement,
after working in IDL for an hour.;-)
Jim Pendleton, SysMgr., etc.
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory/OSSE
Dept. Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern U.
pendleton@ossenu.astro.nwu.edu
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