Re: IDLgrLegend broken

["Mark Hadfield" <m.hadfield(at)niwa.cri.nz>]

"Pavel A. Romashkin" <pavel.romashkin@noaa.gov> wrote in message
news:3A351026.2C587812@noaa.gov...
> > You are right [and I was wrong]
>
> Oh, no. Mark, I never meant to make it sound like that. I apologize if
> you feel I insisted *you* were wrong.

Please don't apologise. You didn't insist I was wrong. I was wrong all by
myself! I've been wrong about this subject (order of searching for
method definitions) for a couple of years now and it's good to have
someone actually check things out and correct me.

Perhaps my posting (quoted above in its full) sounded digruntled...or
tragic? I thought it was just succinct. Somehow people misunderstand me when
I am succinct. I used to have a message on my answerphone that said

    "Mark here. Please leave a message."

I thought that said it all, but I had to alter it because of the complaints.
(I got one of the females in my household to record a more human-friendly
message. You know the sort of thing: "You have reached the house of ......
No-one can come to the phone right now but we'd love to hear from you so
please leave a message after the beep." Me, I find it slightly insulting to
be told stuff I already know (like I don't know to leave the message after
the beep?) but I accept that the rest of the human race (well, the female
half anyway) likes to use redundant communication for personal affirmation,
sort of a form of verbal grooming. (I read about it in "Men are from Mars.
Women are from Venus".)

But I digress...

> ...use explicit naming to avoid *all* confusion. Who will follow
> this path, anyway, with dozens of methods for every object.

I don't think that it's out of the question to have each method definition
in a separate file. This wouldn't cause excessive clutter if you put each
class definition in its own directory. I'm not sure what the effect on
performance would be: more directory searching would be required but time
would be saved in not compiling methods until they're used (if ever).

The only reason cited in the IDL documentation for bundling class
definitions into a single file is this one:

    "Note - If you are working in an environment where the length of
    filenames is limited, you may want to consider defining all object
    methods in the same .pro file you use to define the class structure.
    This practice avoids any problems caused by the need to prepend
    the classname and the two underscore characters to the method
    name. If you must use different .pro files, make sure that all class
    (and superclass) definition filenames are unique in the first eight
    characters.

But who uses IDL on "environments where the length of file names is limited"
these days?

---
Mark Hadfield
m.hadfield@niwa.cri.nz  http://katipo.niwa.cri.nz/~hadfield/
National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research
PO Box 14-901, Wellington, New Zealand