Re: Top 10 IDL Requests

[kashyap(at)head-cfa.harvard.edu (Vinay L. Kashyap)]

1. CALL_EXTERNAL

No one I know has come close to implementing a C or Fortran
call_external in Solaris 2.5+ -- perhaps it's simply a matter
of providing better documentation.

2. _EXTRA

Please consider having all built-in commands accept _EXTRA as a keyword.
pro: making wrapping routines will be a cinch
con: must pay attention to keyword names across the entire suite of programs

3. WHERE

This has been mentioned before, but doesn't hurt to repeat -- a way to
extract the complement of a WHERE() output.

4. last element

Also has been mentioned before.  A means to index the last element of
an array.  Since "*" has a lot of baggage, perhaps some other symbol,
say "%" can be used -- i.e.,
	A[%] \equiv A[N_ELEMENTS(A)-1L]

5. For all built-in functions and procedures

If called with no arguments, or with fewer arguments than required,
please print out the complete (keywords and all) calling sequence.

6. Debugger

Variable Watch interface could use a lot of user-friendliness.  For
example, that spiffy-looking tabular listing should go away.  The
display is too tiny, it doesn't remember scroll position from step
to step, arrays are a pain to look through, etc.
-- 
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kashyap@head-cfa.harvard.edu         617 495 7173 [CfA/P-146] 617 496 7173 [F]