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Re: Why IDL Is Not My Favorite Platform (was Re: IDL alternatives?) [message #4412 is a reply to message #4405] Thu, 01 June 1995 00:00 Go to previous message
thompson is currently offline  thompson
Messages: 584
Registered: August 1991
Senior Member
zowie@banneker.stanford.edu (Craig DeForest) writes:

> For an example in the language syntax itself [one of many], the vector
> processing is very nice -- but (at least, in 3.5 -- don't know if this
> has changed in 4.0) the n:m and * syntaxes don't generalize to higher
> dimensions. ...

I don't understand this. One has always been able to use syntax such as

A = B(3:5,*)
C = D(*,*,6:*)

and in my experience IDL 3.5 was no exception to this.

> An example of poor data structure design: Matrices act like their
> transposes. Enough said. ...

Is this another one of those row-major versus column-major wars? You'll find
proponents on both sides of this issue. IDL differs from C in this, but agrees
with FORTRAN, so take your pick.

The complaint that IDL has grown organically rather than being developed from
the ground up is valid. It started out as a plotting tool for Tektronix 4010
type interfaces. Over the years additional features were added, such as as
image processing and widgets, and it's been ported to a bunch of operating
systems it wasn't originally developed for. It's burdened by the need to be
backwardly compatible for those institutions like here which have spent many
years developing code under it. For all of that, I like it. I think the
advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

As far as price goes, it is expensive. From what I've been able to tell, its
price is roughly comparable to other high end scientific processing packages
available for Unix and VMS platforms. That's not to say that I wouldn't want
to see it cheaper.

For Windows and Mac platforms, however, it's a very expensive product. Of
course I could be wrong, but I think that RSI sees the product as something
that people buy primarily for workstations but also want to use on their PCs
and Macs as well. That's unfortunate, if true.

Bill Thompson

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