Review of IDL

1. Introduction

The Interactive Data Language (IDL) is an interpreted, structured language produced by Research Systems (http://www.rsinc.com/) for the development of visualisation applications. It has it origins in a package developed to process data from NASA's Mars flyby spacecraft in the early 1970s. In the late 1980's Precision Visuals Inc. (now Visual Numberics Inc.) bought the source code for IDL which they then developed into their own product PV-WAVE. Since then IDL and PV-WAVE have both been developed independently.

One of the strengths of IDL is its cross-platform capabilities. IDL is an interpreted language and applications written in it are executed within the IDL environment. Consequently most applications can be moved to other platforms with little or no modification. Supported platforms for IDL version 5.0 are:

Hardware	Operating System	Hardware	Operating System
VMS Alpha AXP	VMS 6.2	VAX	VMS 6.2
UNIX Dec Alpha	Digital UNIX 4.0	HP PaRisc	HP-UX 10.1
IBM RS/600	AIX 4.1	Intel x86	Linux 2.0
SGI R4000	Irix 5.3/6.2	Sun Sparc	Solaris1 and Solaris 2
Windows Intel x86	Windows 3.11, 95, NT	Dec Alpha AXP	Windows NT
Macintosh Motorola 680x0	MacOS 7.1.2	PowerPC	MacOS 7.1.2

This (5.0) is the final release of IDL for Macintosh OS on Motorola 680x0 processors. This is the final release of IDL for Microsoft Windows version 3.11. This is the final release of IDL for VAX VMS (support will continue for Alpha VMS).

For the purposes of this review the Windows 95 version of IDL was used, running on an Intel Pentium II with 32MB of RAM.

Graphics Multimedia Virtual Environments Visualisation Contents