Re: Top 10 IDL Requests

[Struan Gray <struan.gray(at)sljus.lu.se>]

	Has anyone else noticed that despite David's assurance that no hip
programmer would be seen dead fixing old code, that's exactly what all
of us want RSI to do?  They probably hope we're all locked into legacy
code

	In my group at least one of the major reasons people haven't been
persuaded to buy IDL has been the need to learn a whole new bag of
workarounds.  Reliable, predictable keyword use and mathematical
accuracy may not be sexy, but it's something people actually want.

    Looking at the Matlab evil empire (Boo Hiss) and my favourite
quality graphing program (Igor) one other thing IDL doesn't offer is
easy interfacing to data aquisition hardware or the web.  For
sophisticated control you need to get your hands dirty with C++ or
ION$$$$, but it's amazing how much can be achieved with a few simple
vendor-provided hooks for text or raw binary io.  We just interfaced
an old VME crate to Igor on the Mac using strings dumped into text
files and Personal Web Sharing.  Took a morning, and most of that was
reading the VME ethernet card manual.


Struan