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Re: Functions and arrays [message #7581 is a reply to message #7579]

Thu, 05 December 1996 00:00

William Clodius
Messages: 30
Registered: December 1996

Member

Wayne Rigby wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> Please complain directly to RSI about this! We ran into this about a year
> ago, and were unable to get past the first level support folks telling us that
> this was an inevitable consequence of IDL's weak typing.
>
> <snip>

The effect described is not due to weak typing, it is due to poor
scoping. IDL should only be attempting to interpret a name as an
external function reference if the name has not been previously defined
in the scope of the procedure. Providing the name as an argument or
having the name initially appeare on the left hand side of an assignment
should subsequently define it within the scope. It appears that either
they have not clearly differentiated the two name spaces, or they are
improperly searching the external name space first. Note that having
two name spaces may have a performance impact on compilation as function
calls would require two searches rather than one.

My suspicion is that they have not set up two separate name spaces under
the assumption that name conflicts would be extremely rare. Fixing the
scoping issue may require an extensive rewrite of their system.

Allowing '[]' to replace '()' may be a good idea, but it can provide a
maintenance problem for old code.

--

William B. Clodius Phone: (505)-665-9370
Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NIS-2 FAX: (505)-667-3815
PO Box 1663, MS-C323 Group office: (505)-667-5776
Los Alamos, NM 87545 Email: wclodius@lanl.gov

NIS-2: Nonproliferation & International Security Div./
Astrophysics & Radiation Measurements Group

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[Message index]

		Re: Functions and arrays By: David R. Klassen on Sat, 07 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: Tim Patterson on Fri, 06 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: haimov on Fri, 06 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: steinhh on Fri, 06 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: greenwoodde on Thu, 05 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: William Clodius on Thu, 05 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: thompson on Thu, 05 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: Mirko Vukovic on Thu, 05 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: brian.jackel on Thu, 05 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: Anonymous on Thu, 05 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: llobet on Thu, 05 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: Peter Mason on Thu, 05 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: thompson on Wed, 04 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: steinhh on Wed, 04 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: gunter on Wed, 04 December 1996 00:00
		Re: Functions and arrays By: rigby on Wed, 04 December 1996 00:00

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