| IDL as programming language? [message #2735] |
Sat, 27 August 1994 17:24  |
abz
Messages: 1
Registered: August 1994
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Junior Member |
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OK. One the lecturers in our department recently went to Hawaii & America for a
few weeks (lucky him) and came back with the idea of using IDL as a complete
programming language rather than as just a plotter for FORTRAN generated data.
Apparently this is being done overseas. Our department (mathematics) has been
considering this possibility, but nmaking this step would be fairly costly
for us, as we'd have to extend our license, so we want to be sure that we
would be doing the right thing. We have a number of questions, concerning
comparisons between IDL and other programming languages (particularly FORTRAN).
We are currently running an older version of IDL (2.2.2) on a Sun SPARC
station.
(i) Accuracy. Our current version of IDL seems to prefer doing calculations
in single precision, while we prefer double. Has this been improved in the
latest version? (e.g. in our current version, routines like LUDCMP work in
s.p., despite being passed d.p. arguments.)
(ii) Speed. Some of us Grads are running some really time consuming programs
(large arrays, large loops). How does IDL compare with (say) FORTRAN in
general, speedwise? (my impression is that it's pretty slow, but I could be
wrong...)
(iii) Memory. How does IDL's memory management compare? Again, some of our
programs (FORTRAN) have a tendency to gobblelarge chunks of memory (probably
bad programming, but still...)
(iv) What is a large IDL code like to debug?
(v) How 'robust' is IDL as a programming language? We have a variety of
different programming styles here -- some prefer 'quick and dirty' programming,
others a more structured approach. Forgive my possible ignorance, but I have
the impression that IDL as a language is more suited to the 'quick and dirty'
approach. Is this true? Does IDL as a programming language have many
glitches or inconveniences from a mathematical programmers point of view?
Any info/advice would be much appreciated. The types of stuff we do
here are generally large numerical (finite difference) codes on 2D and 3D grids.
I'll wait a while before sending this to see if there is/has been any
discussion on this topic in the newsgroup.
Please email me, or post to this newsgroup if you think anyone else will be
interested.... Thanks
Alec.
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