Re: Plea for IDL 2000 (was: a plea for more reliable mathematical routines)

[ushomirs(at)my-deja.com]

In article <MPG.124ad31447ec3ccd9898f7@news.frii.com>,
  davidf@dfanning.com (David Fanning) wrote:

> New in IDL 5.3 (according to the on-line documentation in the beta
> version is a "compile option" routine that can change the default
> integer size from 16-bit to 32-bit:
>
>    IDL> Compile_Opt DefInt32
>    IDL> a = 0
>    IDL> Help, a
>       A    LONG   =  0
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
>
> P.S. Note there is NO comma after the COMPILE_OPT
> command! Took me about 10 minutes to realize that. :-(


see!  that's yet another example of how poorly thought out IDL is!!
other directives (such as .RUN, .COMPILE) don't need a comma after
their names.   Why not make it .COMPILE_OPT, so that the lack of comma
would at least make sense?  I guess that would be too reasonable and
well thought-out for RSI.. sigh..

greg


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