IDL RELEASE0.1: RELEASE NOTES Jan Pedersen Pedersen.pa@xerox Installation: This distribution consists of three directories on two floppies: Contains compiled files for release0 of IDL Lispusers> Contains associated lispusers files; included with the possibility in mind that field sites may not have a full complement of standard lispusers packages Doc> Contains Tedit documentation files associated lispusers files and updates to the IDL reference manual To install IDL the following steps are required: 1.) Either copy the lispusers files in Lispusers> to a standard location in the file system (that is, a directory in the value of LISPUSERDIRECTORIES), or update the atom LISPUSERDIRECTORIES to include Lispusers> in the search path for LOAD. 2.) LOAD the file LOADIDL.DCOM. As a side effect, all relevant files will be loaded. The full loadup should take between five and ten minutes. Documentation: The IDL reference manual, "The Interactive Data-analysis Language Reference Manual", by Kaplan, Sheil, and Smith, SSL-1978-4, is the main documentation for IDL, although due to the inclusion of new features, supplementary documentation is included in the directory Doc>. In particular, the tty-style graphics mentioned in the reference manual is no longer supported; it has been superceded by the IDL graphics facility. Also, an IDL array inspector has been implemented. Caveats: Source code will not be distributed for several reasons. First, I expect IDL internals to change substantially in the near future, so any code which depends heavily on the current implementation will have a short life time. Second, the distributed "fast" version of IDL differs in subtle ways from the "slow" test environment I use for development, so the connection between IDL source and "fast" compiled code is tenuous at best. As documented in the reference manual, IDL redefines generic arithmetic to operate on IDL arrays. Although this portion of IDL has been thoroughly tested, a bug appearing at this level may manifest itself in a confusing way; be warned. Although largely accurate, the IDL reference manual is out of date in several places. Hopefully, the supplemental documentation will help out, but not all inconsistencies have been noted. Please direct comments and bug reports to: pedersen.pa@xerox .xx(( TIMESROMAN  TIMESROMAN  TIMESROMAN    A2p1+ HNz