Jump to content

Talk:IDL (programming language)

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Zowie (talk | contribs) at 17:43, 4 July 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

(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]

I won't mess with it, but I'm not entirely sure what the appropriate way to write the "Problems" section is, and I'm not especially happy with the way it is now -- several "example problems" have been named, and solutions to them have been posted, but (in my experience anyway) the main problem is one that infects a great deal of late-model software: backward compatibility enshrines earlier mistakes. In the case of IDL, this adds up to a lot of "solutions" that the programmer must remember, and that tend to crowd out real design. I certainly don't want this to become a battleground page -- languages in particular are fodder for unproductive flame wars -- but I don't think that the Problems section does anything useful the way it stands now. It should either be augmented (by someone other than me -- I'm probably too partisan, as a quick google for "zowie IDL" will reveal) or deleted.

Hmmm... Came back to this some weeks later and noticed it was still the same. I added "...requiring individual work-arounds by the programmer", which I hope does not add too much POV but captures the flavor of what I was trying to get across... zowie 4 July 2005 17:43 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:IDL_(programming_language)&oldid=18139588"