Bad data in structure (NaN HowTo?)

[Randall Skelton <rhskelto(at)atm.ox.ac.uk>]

I have an array of large structures which occasionally is filled (via an
external C program) and passed into IDL with -12345 signifying the data
for that element is lost.  I would like to convert the occurances of
-12345 to NaN's in IDL but I am a little perplexed on how to do this.

I had hoped that since this is technically an 'array' (albeit an array of
structures) I would just be able to use the 'where' command; alas, it
appears that structures are not allowed in the where command:

B = where(atrl eq -12345, count)
% Struct expression not allowed in this context: ATRL.

Each structure has about 450 elements in it and is comprised itself of
strings, ints, floats and doubles and arrays of each of the above.  My
initial thought is to make an array of strings which represent the
elements of the structure and loop over that array, searching for '-12345'
in each element or array as I go.  This seems rather inefficient.  It
would be much nicer if I could directly assign the structure element to
NaN in C and pass it into IDL (and have IDL interpret the missing data as
as NaN)?  Oh yes, it would be nice if I could use the same C code on
intel, PowerPC, and sparc architechures...  Does anyone know how this
might be done?

Thanks for the help.

Randall