MacOS X

["J.D. Smith" <jdsmith(at)astro.cornell.edu>]

Has anyone heard if RSI will offer a version of IDL for the new Macintosh
operating system OSX (that's "Ten" for those not in the know)?  There are a few
routes they could go, in order of increasing preference:

1. Do nothing and force users to run IDL in the "Classic" compatibility
environment.
2. Upgrade IDL on Macintosh to be "Carbon-compliant", taking advantage of all
the OS goodies but otherwise minimizing effort.
3. Do a full rewrite targetting the "Yellow Box (Cocoa)" development
environment, and specifically tuning to take advantage of the PowerPC's Altivec
SIMD unit.
4. #3 + add (presumably port from Unix to OSX's BSD layer) a terminal-only
version of IDL.

Some parts of these enumerations are interchangeable.  If it's #4, I might have
to start looking into PowerBooks come January or so!

JD

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