comp.lang.idl-pvwave archive
Messages from Usenet group comp.lang.idl-pvwave, compiled by Paulo Penteado

Home » Public Forums » archive » Re: Warning: IDL 8.0 alters the behaviour of existing valid programs without any notice!
Show: Today's Messages :: Show Polls :: Message Navigator
E-mail to friend 
Return to the default flat view Create a new topic Submit Reply
Re: Warning: IDL 8.0 alters the behaviour of existing valid programs without any notice! [message #72167] Thu, 19 August 2010 04:57 Go to previous message
svhhaugan is currently offline  svhhaugan
Messages: 8
Registered: August 2010
Junior Member
On Aug 18, 8:45 pm, "Jeff N." <jeffnettles4...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> For IDL 8, the rules have suddenly been changed, with no warning
>> and no way to turn it off (other than staying with version 7).
>
> I don't know how you can say there was no warning - ITTVIS has been
> advertising the negative indexing feature for months now.  And it was
> completely obvious to me from the get-go that the new indexing would
> have the effect on where() calls that you're talking about.  It was
> one of the first things I thought of.

I guess we haven't been spending much time reading the advertising ;-)
Anyhow, that's not the kind of warning I referred to.

I think most researchers naively expect new features in a
"programming
language" to preserve the stated semantics of existing code, or at
least
provide (optional) warning mechanisms (compile-time or run-time)
that'll flag those cases where the semantics have been changed.

The help file for IDL 7 said "code similar to the following *can*
be used to avoid errors", not "code similar to the following
*should* be used, because we do not guarantee that an error will
occur in the next version of IDL".

Stein
[Message index]
 
Read Message
Read Message
Read Message
Read Message
Read Message
Read Message
Previous Topic: exporting floats
Next Topic: FITS WCS routines

-=] Back to Top [=-
[ Syndicate this forum (XML) ] [ RSS ] [ PDF ]

Current Time: Fri Oct 10 03:08:26 PDT 2025

Total time taken to generate the page: 0.72422 seconds