Re: Top 10 IDL Requests

[Harvey Rarback <rarback(at)ssrl.slac.stanford.edu>]

	David,

Thanks for taking on the burden of making IDL better.

My request is to give VMS the same status as the other OSes that IDL supports by
eliminating the restriction that the VMS "plain tty" cannot process widget
events, making it impossible to build non-blocking widget applications.

I use both the VMS Development Environment and "plain tty" interface.  I am
forced to do kludges like
 
> help, /key, out=out ; kludge to see if we are running in terminal environment
> cli = strcmp( out[0], '%', 1) eq 0
> defsysv, '!cli', cli, 1 ; /read_only

to be able to determine whether Xmanager returns control to me or not.  As an
aside, is there a better way to determine this information?

Related to this problem:  in IDL 5.3 the restriction that an object could not be
destroyed in its INIT method first appeared.  But if you are building widget
object applications in VMS where the INIT method makes the first call to
Xmanager, you are forced into shenanigans in order to do proper garbage
collection on the object.  Could this restriction be removed?

                                  --Harvey