IDL, short for Interactive Data Language, is a programming language used for data analysis. It is popular in particular areas of science, such as astronomy and medical imaging. IDL shares a common syntax with PV-Wave and originated from the same codebase, though the languages have subsequently diverged in detail. There is also a free implementation, GNU Data Language (GDL).
IDL is vectorized, numerical, and interactive, and is commonly used for i...
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IDL, short for Interactive Data Language, is a programming language used for data analysis. It is popular in particular areas of science, such as astronomy and medical imaging. IDL shares a common syntax with PV-Wave and originated from the same codebase, though the languages have subsequently diverged in detail. There is also a free implementation, GNU Data Language (GDL).
IDL is vectorized, numerical, and interactive, and is commonly used for interactive processing of large amounts of data (including image processing). The syntax includes many constructs from Fortran and some from C.
IDL originated from early VAX/VMS/Fortran, and its syntax still shows its heritage:
The findgen function in the above example returns a one-dimensional array of floating point numbers, with values equal to a series of integers starting at 0.
Note that the operation in the second line applies in a vectorized manner to the whole 100-element array created in the first line, analogous to the way general...
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