.skip

[Mark Fardal <fardal(at)weka.astro.umass.edu>]

Hi,

The .SKIP command doesn't behave quite the way I would prefer.
It doesn't behave as advertised either, although for a different reason.

What it is supposed to do is to skip one statement, or N statements if
you give it an argument N, and then execute 1 statement.  I would
prefer that it not execute that one statement.  It seems silly--after
all, you are usually just going to type .continue--and who's to say
that you won't decide to skip the next statement too.  Besides, it's
not called .skip-and-execute-one.  The usual argument about preserving
backwards code compatability don't apply here, since .SKIP can't be
invoked from a program.

But anyway, what it actually does when you type IDL> .SKIP [N] 
is to skip N statements, and then execute N statements.   Oops.
This is with IDL 5.2.1L on Debian linux.

Before I submit a bug report, I thought I would ask whether people
would like the feature change suggested above as well as the bug fix.
Or are people emotionally attached to the current behavior?

thanks,
Mark


PS: here's a simple example to demonstrate the behavior:

pro junk
print, 'line 2'
print, 'line 3'
print, 'line 4'
print, 'line 5'
print, 'line 6'
print, 'line 7'
print, 'line 8'
print, 'line 9'
print, 'line 10'
end