Getting Started with IDL

The Power of IDL

IDL, the Interactive Data Language, is the ideal software for data analysis, visualization, and cross-platform application development. IDL integrates a powerful, array-oriented language with numerous mathematical analysis and graphical display techniques, thus giving you incredible flexibility. A few lines of IDL can do the job of hundreds of lines of C or Fortran, without losing flexibility or performance. A fourth-generation language, IDL is radically more compact than C or Fortran. Using IDL, tasks that require days or weeks of programming with traditional languages can be accomplished in hours. Users can explore data interactively using IDL commands and then create complete applications by writing IDL programs.

Create Data - Use IDL to create data, using a complete, structured language that can be used interactively and on sophisticated functions, procedures, and applications. Create Applications - Use the IDLDE (IDL Development Environment) to compile and execute commands immediately. It also includes built-in editing and debugging tools that provide instant feedback and "hands-on" interaction.

Read and Write Data - Use IDL to read and write almost any kind of data. Support is provided for common image standards and scientific data formats. If you have data, you can read it into IDL! Visualize Data with the iTools - Use IDL's iTools for your data visualization needs including plots, images, contours, surfaces volumes, and maps.

Signal Processing - Use IDL Signal Processing techniques to process a variety of 1-D signals, from traditional filtering and transform operations to statistical methods such as prediction analysis.

Image Processing - Use IDL Image Processing techniques to filter out noise and to highlight true data characteristics and expose anomalies.

Mapping Capabilities - Use IDL Mapping techniques to plot data over different projections of the globe. Irregularly-Sampled Data - Use IDL to easily fit irregularly-sampled data to a regular grid. This regularly-gridded data can then be sent to IDL's plotting routines.

Animate Images - Use IDL Animation tasks to visualize your data dynamically and to create an array of images and play them back as an animated sequence. Create Applications - Use IDL to write sophisticated programs and applications using a complete set of program-control statements.

  IDL Online Help (March 06, 2007)