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Re: a plea for more reliable mathematical routines
David Fanning wrote:
> Arno (fruncan@zedat.fu-berlin.de) writes:
>
> > so let us discuss strategies to migrate from IDL to something reasonable
> > (almost everything without common blocks and childish attempts to be object
> > oriented).
>
> Oh, come on. I'll be the first to admit that IDL is not
> perfect. But it's a hell of a lot better than most of the
> alternatives. And after seeing the kinds of programs I
> can write with objects, I find your characterization of
> objects as "childish" to be ridiculous.
>
> Cheers,
>
I definitely disagree. It is inferior to Java, Python, C/C++ (if You're able to
program a little bit of OpenGL and Motif yourself) to name only some, far too
expensive, introducing new bugs with every release (maybe a merger with Micro$
would be adequate), lacking hooks for any reasonable development environment (or
have You ever managed to get it to work with Rose or SNiFF+ to name only a few).
Secondly, I definitely did not characterize objects as childish but the way
they're used and implemented in IDL (look folks, now we're object oriented !).
What has been done there to the object paradigm is pretty much the same as they
did to numerical mathematics (look folks, we've the numerical recipes
implemented, ok the results are shaky at best, but look we have them
implemented). To incorporate an object oriented paradigm (encompassing, yes
David, a development process as well) is a little different to providing a syntax
of o->x() form.
Regards, Arno
>
> David
>
> P.S. Just for the record, I agree completely with Richard
> French that some kind of consolidation of what is already
> *in* IDL to make it work correctly is badly overdue. I would
> be happy (as I'm sure many of you would be) to forgo six
> months of new features to have the NLEVELS keyword to the
> CONTOUR command actually compute N levels. :-)
>
Yes, just make the darn thing work (at least for once in its history) !!
>
> --
> David Fanning, Ph.D.
> Fanning Software Consulting
> Phone: 970-221-0438 E-Mail: davidf@dfanning.com
> Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
> Toll-Free IDL Book Orders: 1-888-461-0155
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