Re: Inexpensive / free-ware similar to IDL?

[grunes(at)yahoo.com]

I for one find this very interesting, and
think the post did us all a great service.

Do any of these products have all of the following
characteristics (which IDL and WAVE both have):

(1) Ability to handle arrays of arbitrary dimensionality
    (not just 1 or 2 or 3 dimensions), of 1, 2 and 4
    byte integers, 4 and 8 byte reals, and 8 and
    16 byte complexes (actually, WAVE omits the
    16 byte complexes, last I checked).
(2) Ability to read raw bytestream files containing
    mixtures of 1,2 and 4 byte integers, 4 and 8 byte
    reals, and complex numbers.  We all frequently need
    to handle other-people's-data-format files.
(3) Ability to reverse byte orders of those data
    types, so we can easily interpret data from other
    types of machine.
(4) Can produce PROFESSIONAL-LOOKING (e.g. not
    GNUPLOT-like) 2D plots, with professional
    looking fonts.  Can overplot other plots and
    isolated points on the same plot frame in other
    colors.  Should be able to display to screen,
    and output to postscript, and output to an image
    file would also be nice.
(5) Can display images easily, with user settable
    pseudo-color tables.  Same comments about display
    and output as above.
(6) Can read and write common image formats, like
    TIFF and GIF.
(7) Has support for matrix operations (inversion,
    solution of equations, eigen-values and eigen
    vectors), for the most frequent transcendental
    arithmetic operations you find on scientific
    calculators.
(8) Allows you to draw buttons (or at least text)
    on a graphics screen, and can detect the press
    of a mouse button and where it occurred--useful
    for setting up one's own GUIs.  Another capability
    that is nice (but not essential) is the ability
    to detect single key presses.

If any of the free packages meet all this, I might
well switch for some purposes, especially if they
run as fast or faster than IDL/PV-WAVE, and run on
multiple platforms.


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