Talk:IDL (programming language)

(Full disclosure -- I (User:Mpiper) am an RSI employee.) The phrase "IDL's market share has been recently decreasing considerably" in the second sentence isn't true. I don't want to change it, though, because it could be seen as a conflict of interest. I think a less strongly worded statement, or a deletion, would be more appropriate.

(William M. Connolley 21:52, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)) Fair enough... my own disclosure: I use and like IDL. I have no idea what its market share is. But perhaps some figures could be supplied if anyone wants to reinsert the text.

I modified the statement about loop speed: if I understand correctly, IDL loops are implemented in C and therefore can't be faster than a well-designed loop in C -- they can at most run as fast as such a thing. That is true of modern vectorized languages in general, including IDL, GDL, Matlab, Octave, Python, and Perl. zowie 19:10, 3 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

(William M. Connolley 19:44, 3 May 2005 (UTC)) Fair enough. IDL is probably faster than a non-well-crafted-by-the-user loop, but as fast as a well crafted one...[reply]