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.