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Re: Interesting Rant [message #51297 is a reply to message #51296]

Wed, 15 November 2006 07:03

greg michael
Messages: 163
Registered: January 2006

Senior Member

I've used IDL for about three years - I think that makes me a
relatively new user, at least in IDL history. In my early experience
with it, I was frequently frustrated by its incoherent design -
especially the completely arbitrary (and awful) naming of built-in
procedures (also that strange comma/bracket distinction for
functions/procedures). But these are really only cosmetic things - once
you've written something in a dozen lines that took a hundred in
another language, there's no turning back.

The complaints about IDL loops seem to me to have missed the point - my
old hoards of triple-nested loops with the inevitable bugs to be fixed
around the end conditions have disappeared forever. You don't have to
think about individual elements *ever*, until you want one. This is the
single reason for me that makes it better than any other language I've
used.

It's true the graphics are either ugly or awkward, and there are
atrociously deficient functions like read_ascii() lying around, but
with some experience you can overcome these, and the benefits of the
array handling easily make it worth it. I like very much that you can
make platform-independent code, too. Would be nice, of course, if a new
version turns up one day with plots that look decent. Will have to come
eventually - if not in IDL, then the next language. I'm not a dinosaur
- I'd change to something better, but I haven't seen it yet.

regards,
Greg

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[Message index]

		Re: Interesting Rant By: Braedley on Wed, 15 November 2006 07:47
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Jo Klein on Wed, 15 November 2006 07:20
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Maarten[1] on Wed, 15 November 2006 07:17
		Re: Interesting Rant By: K. Bowman on Wed, 15 November 2006 06:47
		Re: Interesting Rant By: greg michael on Wed, 15 November 2006 07:03
		Re: Interesting Rant By: David Fanning on Wed, 15 November 2006 06:10
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Maarten[1] on Wed, 15 November 2006 05:25
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Robbie on Tue, 14 November 2006 17:13
		Re: Interesting Rant By: James Kuyper on Tue, 14 November 2006 15:25
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Richard Edgar on Tue, 14 November 2006 11:13
		Re: Interesting Rant By: David Fanning on Tue, 14 November 2006 11:09
		Re: Interesting Rant By: news.qwest.net on Tue, 14 November 2006 10:56
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Paul Van Delst[1] on Tue, 14 November 2006 10:36
		Re: Interesting Rant By: David Fanning on Wed, 15 November 2006 10:44
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Earl F. Glynn on Wed, 15 November 2006 09:19
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Paul Van Delst[1] on Thu, 16 November 2006 08:02
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Earl F. Glynn on Wed, 15 November 2006 09:07
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Jeff Hester on Sat, 18 November 2006 13:42
		Re: Interesting Rant By: fburton on Wed, 15 November 2006 10:24
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Paolo Grigis on Wed, 15 November 2006 09:02

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