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

[davidf(at)dfanning.com (David Fanning)]

Greg (ushomirs@my-deja.com) writes:

> 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..

Well, to be fair, other "compiler option" commands don't
take commas either. For example, "Forward_Function foobar".
Such syntax is undoubtedly necessary to make the compiler aware of
an option for it rather than to compile a procedure or 
function, which it would do otherwise. It makes sense
to me and I would have probably realized it if I had
taken 5 seconds to think about it, rather than typing
away. Or, I could have just looked at the example in
the book. It was pretty obvious there. :-)

Cheers,

David

P.S. Incidentally, another compiler option will make it
necessary to use square bracket subscripting for all
array subscripts. This will virtually eliminate the
need for Forward_Function, I think.

-- 
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting
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