Re: Top 10 IDL Requests

[Dennis Boccippio <djboccip(at)hotmail.com>]

In article <MPG.13db815b76724572989b5b@news.frii.com>, 
davidf@dfanning.com (David Fanning) wrote:

> Hi Folks,
> 
> I was teaching an IDL course at RSI this past week
> <snip>...
> So, here is the deal. If you feel inclined to
> submit a couple of ideas to this newsgroup, I 
> will collect them and submit them personally 
> to the VP. I'll even follow up and make sure 
> he has, uh, read them. :-)
> 

I'll definitely toss a couple in.  And I second the vote for putting the 
table widget out of its misery.

- Work on improving / optimizing the speed of IDL objects and related
  outgrowths - these seem amazingly flexible, but so many object-driven
  widgets or apps seem unacceptably sluggish.  I'd be more inclined to
  delve into object-driven code if I could be assured the end result
  would be more responsive than some of the object graphics, e.g.

- Adding some basic neural network algorithms to the stock procedures 
  (I'm interested from a category classification standpoint, and IDL's
  flexibility at I/O and workability with large datasets seems to make it
  well suited for handling the large training/validation sets needed to
  drive nn's, as well as the visualization needed to tune them
  (As an aside, is anyone aware of any 3rd party nn implementations for 
   IDL?)  

- This is very picayune, and major strides have been made, but RSI needs
  to finish the job on HDF VDATAs.  The browser and interface routines
  currently can't handle mixed-data-type vdatas, which for us results 
  in an awful lot of unpack-the-byte-array code that needs to be written.
  We only use HDF for large datasets, where the overhead seems justified,
  and for these it makes alot of sense to use the minimum necessary data
  type for each vdata "column".  Perhaps RSI's ties to Fortner (Noesys)
  could get them access to the necessary underlying code?

- Indirectly IDL: Add a WHERE node to VIP, and somehow make loops more
  visually distinctive

- Not a development issue, but perhaps lower the price on runtime 
  licensing...

- Dennis