The Gnu Data Language (GDL) is a free alternative to the data visualization and analysis tool, called, IDL, frequently used by scientists. MacResearch.org published a short story on Wednesday about GDL and provided contact information.
Dr. Gaurav Khanna wrote: "It [GDL] is fully compatible with IDL 6.0 and it appears to work very well. It is fully supported on Mac OS X (Intel/PPC)."
IDL and GDL are graphics-language tools that allow a researcher to write Fortran-like code that interfaces with a very high level set of standardized 3-D graphics APIs that provide for scientific visualization. These high level APIs are platform independent which allows IDL and GDL code, once written, to run on any platform thatis supported. This includes Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and the major UNIX systems from SGI, HP, and Sun.
Dr. Khanna is a professional astronomer, an expert user of these tools, and makes frequent contributions to MacResearch.org.