Re: TeXtoIDL fix for IDL 5.3

[thompson(at)orpheus.nascom.nasa.gov (William Thompson)]

"Mark Hadfield" <m.hadfield@niwa.cri.nz> writes:

>Randall Smith <rsmith@kracko.harvard.edu> wrote in message
>owemabj2db.fsf@kracko.harvard.edu">news:owemabj2db.fsf@kracko.harvard.edu...
>>
>>
>>
>> Anyway, it turns out that RSI, in a fit of what can only be described
>> as morally degenerate programming, added a new function (strtok) to
>> the language, although they _didn't_ see fit to document this (it's
>> apparently part of the new string routines stregex, strjoin, strmatch,
>> and strsplit that are in IDL 5.3).

>It's even more irritatingly trivial than that. They added strtok, then
>decided to call it strsplit, but instead of renaming it they wrote strsplit
>as a wrapper. Strsplit's code, in its entirety, is:

>    function strsplit, string, pattern, _ref_extra=extra

>    if (n_params() eq 1) then return, strtok(string, _extra=extra) $
>    else return, strtok(string, pattern, _extra=extra)

>    end

That's because people complained that there was already a long-standing routine
in the IDL Astronomy Library called strsplit, so RSI renamed it strtok.
However, because they had already advertised that they were adding strsplit,
they provided this wrapper.  Now people are complaining about strtok.  I guess
you just can't win.  ;^)

William Thompson