No worries. It was an interesting trip down memory lane.
My start on PDL happened in the context of a project I called "VERNIER" way
back in 2000/2001. ("VERNIER's Environment at Runtime is Not IDL's Environment
at Runtime"). VERNIER was meant to be what GDL later became. I got as far as
a basic parser and symbol table management, but my management got wind of it
and told me to cease and desist, since distributing it would be a violation of
the IDL end-user license. VERNIER would have used the very
early-and-somewhat-primitive PDL threading capability, and managed the runtime
environment within Perl (like Perl, IDL isn't context-free).
That C&D turned out to be great because it freed me from slavishly trying to
duplicate IDL's wretched environment, and I was able to see that it was worth
the effort to just port the tools I needed to a new environment.
Anyway, that's why I perked up: at first glance it looks a lot like a modern
implementation of VERNIER, which would have been pretty cool to hand out to
colleagues...
Sorry to maunder on...
On Sep 10, 2014, at 6:35 AM, David Mertens <[email protected]> wrote:
> D'oh! Sorry, I just assumed it was *the* IDL. Oops.
>
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 10:19 PM, Craig DeForest <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> Heh. You had me going there! IDL in this case appears not to be the
> Interactive Data "Language" most scientists know and hate, it's Interface
> Design Language, which is entirely different (and probably a lot more
> powerful)... :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Craig
>
>
> On Sep 9, 2014, at 7:19 PM, David Mertens <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Apparently, there's an IDL -> Perl translator written in Marpa:
>> https://metacpan.org/release/MarpaX-Languages-IDL-AST
>>
>> If you've never heard of Marpa, it is a fancy parser that's supposed to be
>> super theoretical (and performance) awesome. I have yet to dive in myself,
>> but I like the idea.
>>
>> David
>>
>> --
>> "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
>> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
>> by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
>> _______________________________________________
>> Perldl mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
>
>
>
>
> --
> "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
> by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
_______________________________________________
Perldl mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
