| Re: idl and R [message #59642 is a reply to message #36927] |
Fri, 04 April 2008 07:58  |
ben.bighair
Messages: 221
Registered: April 2007
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Senior Member |
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On Apr 4, 5:26 am, rlaybe...@hotmail.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> Does anybody have a summary of the major differences between R and
> idl? I have been using idl for years and have never used R. I
> understand R is statistics orientated, but does it do anything that
> idl can't or does it do it better?
>
Hi,
I have been using R for about a year - this is part of the plan in one
project to replace IDL with ImageJ and R as we move toward open
source software. I still use IDL extensively for other projects. I
haven't hit a real "comfort level" with R, but I have used it as a
general purpose language for working with text files - mostly things
that can be managed as data.frames (simple spreadsheet-like data
structures.) In IDL I had built extensive OO libraries around
handling vectors of simple structures that are quite analogous to data
frames in R.
I, too, thought of R as statistics oriented - and it sure has a lot
going for it in that realm - but my year-into-it-now sense is that it
is better to call it a general purpose language. Keep in mind I
haven't really had much formal training in programming.
Perhaps first and foremost - the user group around R, like this one
around IDL, is very helpful. It is also a lot bigger.
Second - library distribution is a snap in R. The base package of R
has a lot of stuff in it, but sometimes you need to import extra stuff
(like mapping tools for instance). I found it *incredibly easy* to do
so. (This is very much unlike my experience with Python on PPC Mac -
great software but what a mess adding SciPy libraries.)
One thing I haven't noodled out about R is object inheritance. In R
there are two distinct layers of object-oriented programming - the
oldish S3 and the newish S4 styles. I haven't been able to penetrate
the S4 paradigm which I gather is more akin to the OO paradigm in
IDL. So for now I have single files of multiple functions that accept
my data object as an argument. I really couldn't call that OO work
with a heap variable - there is a whole lot of copying arguments going
on. I really miss the simplicity of the IDL OO paradigm.
I haven't jumped into any GUI/Widget stuff with R. That kind of stuff
requires extra libraries (Tk/Tcl, Wx, etc.) which are easy to load,
but each has its own API. Recently a limited "gWidget" system has
been introduced for R that provides a consistent API regardless of
which widget toolkit the user chooses to use underneath. I think this
has the flavor of IDL's widgets (with Motif or Windows underneath) - I
hope to dive into that someday.
I don't pay too much attention to computing power things, but here is
a dated comparison of R with some other languages (but not IDL)...
http://www.sciviews.org/benchmark/index.html
Hope that is helpful.
Ben
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