Re: 5.4

[mole6e23(at)hotmail.com (Todd Clements)]

>can't say enough how much adding break and continue, and switch also,

Those three are probably what I'm looking forward to most. I hated some of
the things I did in place of these (can you say "goto"?... I hate goto!)

As for the complement in where and the nbins keyword to histogram, it's
sure nice to have them, but truly I think most of us that use IDL
regularly have already implemented them in some form or another as our own
routine. I still don't know why these weren't there with the original
versions of these functions!

A fast array_equal is definitely welcome!

>Printing with C-style formats?  Say bye-bye
>FORMAT='(A,T25,A,T36,A,T50,A)'

This is perhaps my second favorite. I learned C well before I ever saw
Fortran, and I've hated fortran ever since the first day I saw it,
partially because of the (IMHO) horrible looking handling of strings. I
like C-style much, much better!

I personally think the whole thing with not supporting LZW compression
(GIF and compressed TIFFs) is kind of silly, both on behalf of Compuserve
(and whatever their parent company is...I can't remember), and on the part
of RSI (actually, it's Kodak that did this one, I'm sure). As far as I
recall, the licensing for LZW is not all that extreme (I recall a number
of $1/end user, but I could be wrong), and given the cost of IDL, it
doesn't seem that would "break the bank", per se.  And now you have to get
a special license (albeit free) to make MPEG movies? OK, we'll do it
because we make MPEG movies, but why? And if you're going to do that, why
not do the same thing for LZW? Rant, Rant, Rant....


>Thoughts, reactions, uninformed rantings?  

Well, other than the 300+ page "what's new" manual, I'm definitely part of
the "uninformed" group. =)

Todd