Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming

IDL Workbench Won't Stop Analyzing Code

QUESTION: Yikes! I was just fooling around a little bit with IDL and all of a sudden my IDL Workbench won't stop “analyzing code”. My CPU meter is pegged, and my computer is getting too hot to touch. What's going on here!?

ANSWER: My guess is you were changing the IDL path and you modified it incorrectly. A misplaced path or directory delimiter is the usual culprit. If the Workbench can't resolve the !PATH, it will spin it's wheels for a long time, without throwing any kind of an error, and will exhibit exactly the symptoms you describe. I'd check your IDL path with a fine-toothed comb.

Here is a little routine, named PrintPath, I find helpful for identifying these kinds of problems.

    PRO PrintPath 
      parts = StrSplit(!PATH, Path_Sep(/SEARCH_PATH), /Extract)
      FOR j=0,N_Elements(parts)-1 DO Print, parts[j]           END 

Version of IDL used to prepare this article: IDL 7.0.1.

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