Re: Lose control of IDL window

[Med Bennett <mbennett(at)indra.com>]

I think it's crazy, though, that IDL doesn't give you any way of killing an
out-of-control process.  I have had situations where I have made a programming
error that resulted in an infinite loop, and there was no way short of killing
IDL to get out, thus losing (possibly) unsaved work.  Way back in IDL 4.x (?)
you could do a Ctrl-Break or something that would save you in such cases, but no
longer.

Mark Hadfield wrote:

> <philippe_fischer2000@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
> 94mts8$8lv$1@nnrp1.deja.com">news:94mts8$8lv$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> > I have recently switched from using IDL in a UNIX environment to
> > Windows2000 (not my choice!). When running a job in the idlde I lose
> > control of the window while the job is running. I regain control once
> > the job finishes. By lose control I mean I cannot maximize the window
> > (if I have minimized from the toolbar), I cannot view output in the
> > window and I cannot "break" out of the job. If I try to put the cursor
> > over the idlde window it disappears. An example of job that causes this
> > problem is:
> >
> > for i=1L,1000000 do print,'hi'
> >
> > Has anybody encountered this problem?
>
> Er ... yes.
>
> > I have been corresponding with
> > somebody at RSI but he hasn't come up with any solutions yet.
>
> That doesn't surprise me.
>
> What does surprise me (slightly) is that the problem doesn't occur on Unix.
> (I have run IDL on various versions of Windows for 7 years now, but hardly
> ever on Unix.) I think it has to do with the differences between Unix (or
> X-Windows) & Windows in how they allocate responsibility for managing
> windows: in Unix the window manager can minimise a window but on Windows it
> leaves this to the application. If IDLDE is busy then it neglects to manage
> its window and all events received inside the IDLDE window boundaries are
> queued up. The only exception seems to be that IDLDE clears its events when
> a program calls the WIDGET_EVENT function. (But I am guessing to some extent
> here.)
>
> <old_fart_mode>Actually you young people of today don't know how lucky you
> are. Back in the days of 16-bit Windows, running any time-consuming command
> in IDL would make the entire machine unresponsive until the command had
> completed.</old_fart_mode>
>
> Anyway to get to a solution (of sorts): Back in the 16-bit Windows days I
> wrote a widget application that allowed other applications a look in by
> calling the Windows API Yield function. This has metamorphosed over the
> years into my MGHwaiter class. The idea is that you create a MGHwaiter
> object then during a lengthy calculation you can make regular calls to the
> object's Yield method. See:
>
> http://katipo.niwa.cri.nz/~hadfield/gust/software/idl/
> http://katipo.niwa.cri.nz/~hadfield/gust/software/idl/mghwaiter__define.pro
>
> I don't know if this "solution" is of any use to you. You may find, as I
> have, that you can live with an unresponsive IDL window after all. Why not
> play Pinball while the command is running? Or scan the comp.lang.idl-pvwave
> newsgroup?
>
> ---
> Mark Hadfield
> m.hadfield@niwa.cri.nz  http://katipo.niwa.cri.nz/~hadfield/
> National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research
> PO Box 14-901, Wellington, New Zealand