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Re: Interesting Rant [message #51385 is a reply to message #51314]

Wed, 15 November 2006 10:31

Richard Edgar
Messages: 8
Registered: February 2006

Junior Member

Earl F. Glynn wrote:

>> Row-major vs column major is a silly point... you just need to know
>> which way the language does it, and that's the end of the matter. And
>> I'd dispute the bit about 'every other language in the history of
>> mankind' too ;-)
>
> Perhaps a bit exaggerated above, but I don't think this is a silly point at
> all, especially when one must switch between programming languages to
> maintain software. Perhaps, I'm wrong, but IDL's arrays seem to be unique,
> and unlike C or FORTRAN.

That's true. And I have been caught on numerous occasions by IDL
starting its indices from zero.

> FORTRAN or R: column-major format [nrows, ncolumns], 1-origin

Small point, but Fortran will start indexing from whatever number you
tell it. Of course, the default is 1.

> The lack of a standard convention here could easily contribute to
> programming errors, especially if one uses IDL and other programming
> languages. Converting code from other languages could also be problematic
> because of silly mistakes getting subscripts right.

That's true, although since IDL always (?) does bounds-checking, I've
usually found my slips get caught pretty fast. That's the only annoyance
with this issue I've found. Of course, I have a particular perspective
on this.... I'm not doing image processing, and I'm only using IDL to
process output from other code, rather than doing significant
computation in its own right (hence I consider optimising my IDL
programs to be less important, and I generally restrict myself to making
sure that something is vectorised). For people who are using IDL to do
image processing and number crunching, I can see that the inconsistency
would get particularly annoying.

Richard

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[Message index]

		Interesting Rant By: David Fanning on Tue, 14 November 2006 09:40
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Nigel Wade on Fri, 17 November 2006 05:00
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Steve Eddins on Thu, 16 November 2006 17:00
		Re: Interesting Rant By: greg michael on Thu, 16 November 2006 09:35
		Re: Interesting Rant By: JD Smith on Fri, 17 November 2006 11:44
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Nigel Wade on Thu, 16 November 2006 01:51
		Re: Interesting Rant By: James Kuyper on Wed, 15 November 2006 15:55
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Mike[2] on Wed, 15 November 2006 13:21
		Re: Interesting Rant By: news.qwest.net on Wed, 15 November 2006 11:36
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Foldy Lajos on Wed, 15 November 2006 12:38
		Re: Interesting Rant By: gknoke on Wed, 15 November 2006 12:13
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Richard Edgar on Wed, 15 November 2006 10:31

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