Re: Top 10 IDL Requests

[Alex Schuster <alex(at)pet.mpin-koeln.mpg.de>]

I'll add some suggestions, too.

1) Improve the widgets. I see this barely mentioned in this group, but:
they suck. They really do. Why do I have to use hacks to get keyboard
events? This is ridiculous. And it doesn't work for unusual keys like
Alt-F3. I haven't tried this, but I guess even with menu bars an Alt-F
doesn't open the File menu, does it? 
And they don't look good. When I create a row base and some
widget_sliders, cw_fields and cw_bgroups with labels, then the labels
have a different vertical position. At least in IDL 5.2 under Unix which
I am still using, but I would be surprised if this was changed in 5.3.
So when I want a really good-looking interface, I have to create some
small extra bases in which these widgets have an y offset.
Is the 'widget TLB not resizing properly' bug fixed yet? Well, I bet it
isn't. And for me the trick with setting the UPDATE keyword doesn't
always seem to work. 

2) I also would prefer it IDL would not remove trailing dimensions of 1
in some cases. I quite often use code like
	img = reform( fltarr( x, y, z ), x, y, z )
because z might be 1, but I still want to access the data as 3d image.
Of course old code has to work unchanged, so maybe something like
img=fltarr(x,y,z,/strict ) would do the job.

3) It would be nice if RANDOM() would work correctly in ALL versions of
IDL (including IDL x.y.0), not only in IDL x.y.1. Such bugs make me feel
sad. I use IDL as a scienfic tool, and I need to rely on the correct
implementation of the mathematical routines.

4) When I report a bug to RSI, it would be nice if I got a notification
that it is fixed.

5) The complement to WHERE() is great. Now I would like routines which
give me the intersection of two arrays, the union, and the difference.
These already exist (setintersection.pro etc.), but they were written by
somebody and are not part of the standard distribution. 
I'd also like something like an IN operator: a IN b gives 1, if the
scalar a is in the array b.

I think I forgot many points, but the list in long enough already. 

        Alex
-- 
  Alex Schuster     Wonko@weird.cologne.de          PGP Key available
                    alex@pet.mpin-koeln.mpg.de