Re: Relative strengths: IDL vs. PV-Wave ?

[Robert Jansen <jansen(at)tsunami.nrl.navy.mil>]

Martin Szummer wrote:
> 
> Dear All,
> 
>   I am planning to acquire IDL or PV-Wave, and I was looking for
> information about their respective strenghts.  The FAQ avoids
> this issue, so I was hoping you could enlighten me, while
> being fair to both parties.
> 
>   The following things are very important in my work:
>  . image and video processing
>  . machine learning and neural nets
>  . rich programming language (batch processing)
>  . linking with C/C++ code (under Windows NT, but also perhaps Linux)
>  . speed (including speed of the IDL language)
>  . many active users
>  How do the products compare in the above regards?
> 
>  What product has the largest active user community?
> 
>   From IDL and PV-Wave's Web pages, I get the impression that
> PV-Wave sells more different commercial components/toolboxes
>      (signal processing, beta image processing)
> 
>  What are your thoughts?
> 
>  Thank you,
>               Martin Szummer

IDL is better.  It has better color handling, more complete algorithms,
better memory management, faster algorithms.  This is comming from
someone who uses PV-Wave (Since it's what is on most of the machines
I use). For example the image rotation routines in IDL allow for
bicubic-spline interpolation which is not in PV-Wave. They have
also provided a general interpolation routine "interpolate" which
should be a part of any image analysis package but is not in 
PV-Wave.  They also have 24bit color graphics.
What PV-Wave has done is to write a ton of silly little utilities
which could easily be written by a beginner user. For example
they have a function called avg.pro which takes the average of an
array. It is nothing more than total(a)/n_elements(a).  There
are a million other examples. These tend to reduce the usefullness
of the language as far as I'm concerned since they use up names
and clutter up the language.

However, you may have to consider costs. I think IDL may be more
expensive.

You of course should look at MATLAB also which may beat out
both of these due to the ease with wich it connects with
C/C++

jansen@tsunami.nrl.navy.mil

-- 
Robert Jansen                                  o       /o
NRL-SEALAB                              o     /o\      \o__
Tel: 202-767-8244                      /       |       /
FAX: 202-767-5599                     /_\o    / \     /\
                                       /      \ /    / /
                                      Pass    Set    Spike