comp.lang.idl-pvwave archive: archive » Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type

Home » Public Forums » archive » Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type

Show: Today's Messages :: Show Polls :: Message Navigator
E-mail to friend

Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type [message #83512 is a reply to message #83459]

Thu, 07 March 2013 10:12

David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001

Senior Member

Paul van Delst writes:

> If it makes you feel any better, I lay awake at night worrying about
> plausibly incorrect results. In any language.

Well, it *does* make me feel better. :-)

> But, I don't really use IDL to produce quantitative results (computing
> means and stddevs don't count)

I was on a forum web page not too long ago and the folks there were
going off on how horrible IDL was to do anything sensible and how it
confounded expectations, was impossible for new people to learn, etc.
Then some guy jumps in to say, 'Wait, there is a web site out there
where the guy tries to fix all the things that are wrong with IDL.'

It stopped me. Is that what I've been doing all these years? Fixing IDL?

I suppose it is. And then I got totally depressed. Why do I do this
work? And why do I do it for free, for God's sake!? I've no money in the
bank, a job that pays very little, and I choose to spend my time fixing
IDL. It's a joke.

That's when I decided to go trekking in Patagonia. :-)

Before I leave, though, I wrote my own histogram routine, cgHistogram,
which I am just about to add to the Coyote Library. It fixes the bug
with byte arrays (not fixed officially until IDL 8.2), checks to be sure
the binsize data type matches the data type of the data you are binning,
so you always get the correct results, allows for missing values in the
histogram, will smooth the data if needed, and will return the relative
frequency, instead of the histogram count, if you want that. It is a
HELL of a lot better than the Histogram command, as always. Maybe one or
two people will use it. ;-)

Cheers,

David

--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.idlcoyote.com/
Sepore ma de ni thue. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")

Report message to a moderator

[Message index]

		Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: David Fanning on Tue, 05 March 2013 08:57
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: David Fanning on Thu, 07 March 2013 16:46
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: David Fanning on Thu, 07 March 2013 16:42
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: Craig Markwardt on Thu, 07 March 2013 16:37
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: Paul Van Delst[1] on Thu, 07 March 2013 13:44
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: David Fanning on Thu, 07 March 2013 10:12
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: bobgstockwell on Fri, 22 March 2013 10:36

Previous Topic:	Re: cgblendimage without a window? - a bit stuck!
Next Topic:	Interpolation and creating profiles from contour maps.

-=] Back to Top [=-

[ Syndicate this forum (XML) ] [

] [

]

Current Time: Wed Oct 08 17:44:54 PDT 2025

Total time taken to generate the page: 0.00859 seconds