Command-line IDL for Emacs on Windows: Callable IDL?

["Dick Jackson" <dick(at)d-jackson.com>]

Hi all,

I see in the archives that this topic almost came up last month, but I
thought I would dust it off properly now.

Over a year ago (!), Stein Vidar kindly wrote:
>
> others wrote:
>
> > > Has anyone had success calling IDL for Windows as a
> > > sub-process of NT-Emacs?
>
> > [...] it *sure* would be nice to have idlwave-shell...
>
> Now, it shouldn't be too difficult to make a Callable IDL
> version of this setup, simply writing a main program that
> initializes IDL, and sends all input to the IDL_ExecuteStr
> (instead of IDL_RPCExecuteStr). Voila, and you've created your
> own tty-input version of IDL.... I think.

With recent advances in the IDLWAVE mode, I'm more interested than ever to
see if this could be made to work. Unfortunately, I don't do C myself, and I
wonder if anyone out there has the means to give this a try. If a few hours
would be enough to prove or disprove this, I would be happy to compensate
someone for the effort. Of course, I'd probably just share the result with
anyone else who wanted it...

I think what I would need is a PC executable (for Windows NT or 2000) that
acts as a command-line IDL process, and would be referred to by some
idlwave-shell variable. Then, if all is well, we'll be able to run and debug
IDL entirely in Emacs.

Anyone interested? I'd be happy to hear from you, and I bet I'm not the only
one!

Cheers
--
-Dick

Dick Jackson                     /         dick@d-jackson.com
D-Jackson Software Consulting   /    http://www.d-jackson.com
Calgary, Alberta, Canada       /   Voice/Fax: +1-403-242-7398