From: alans@ll.mit.edu (Alan Jay Stein)
Subject: PVI jerk toots own horn on net [flame; how'd you guess? :-]
Organization: MIT/Lincoln Lab - Radars R Us
Date: 19 Aug 92 17:07:31

As you may recall, On Wed, 19 Aug 1992 16:30:13 GMT, greg@pvi.UUCP (Greg Holling x376) said:

jacobsen@bnlls1.nsls.bnl.gov (Chris Jacobsen) writes:
> To the guy with Matlab-PV~WAVE hooks:
> What about contacting Research Systems Inc, makers of IDL (the
> father and now possibly better and more bug-free peer of PV~WAVE).

PV-MORON> The parent has some effect on the quality of the child, but that
PV-MORON> effect is limited after the child leaves the nest.  Give PVI some
PV-MORON> credit.  We have roughly twice as many engineers as RSI working on bug
PV-MORON> fixes & enhancements to the original product.

PV-MORON> 'nuff said.

***NOT!***

First of all, this is no place to advertise! I can't believe PVI doesn't have a
corporate policy prohibiting this, but I'm sure gonna find out now! 

And about giving you some credit: 

You charge way more for the same basic product, have no programmable X Widgets,
and no IMSL link. And before you spout off about the NAG garbage, I'd like to
remind you that this is a brain-dead, one for one parameter implementation, no
easier than writing c-code which we can do without putting your kids through
college. Apparantly, a few smart RSI engineers can do a lot more than a lot of
stupid PV ones.

I have been a *very* satisfied IDL user for 6 years. When I changed groups in
the lab a year and a half ago, and had to recommend a data-analysis package, 
I wrote this about IDL:

"...IDL can dramatically reduce algorithm development time due to its
interactive environment and wealth of built-in functions, while being extensible
via its programming language and X-Windows based utilities. In fact, custom
graphical user interfaces can be built on top of IDL... "

"...Research Systems, Inc. has been a remarkably cooperative vendor to
work with, promptly responding to both oral and written comments
regarding IDL's performance, whether a bug report or a desired feature...."

If anybody doubts this, please note that David Stern of RSI came to Lincoln
a few months back for a dog-n-pony show. I casually mentioned to him that I'd 
like a way for a program to grab the byte size of a structure (which is printed 
out with a help, /struct command but wasn't available at the time). Shortly 
thereafter, the keyword  "/len" was added to the n_tags function to give me 
what I needed...Anybody get that kind of service from Precision Visuals? 

And finally if you're working on a Unix box, can you really buy the "bigger 
is better" argument? IDL wins on price, and on features. In conclusion,

*************>  Stay Away from PVI, folks!!!  Buy IDL!!!  <****************

--
        Alan J.Stein    MIT/Lincoln Laboratory    alans@ll.mit.edu

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*                       medalist Scott Donie!                                  *
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.idl-pvwave