Re: news from the IRAF folks...

[Ron Wickersham <rjw@alembic.com>]

This is great news.  Of course it means some of us will need to learn yet
another language, but Python is at least apparently worthwhile to learn.
Regretably the asronomical community seems to abandon languages and i would
have preferred that they had chosen Perl (which was first written for
astronomical data), or Forth (Kitt Peak Forth, anyone?).

On another note, if anyone still reads Dr. Dobbs Jornal after they abandoned
Forth the November issue on page 83 has a very lightweight article on "XML
fir Instrument Control and Monitoring" which discusses Instrument Markup
Language, IML, and Astronomical instrument Markup Language, AIML.  Looking
on the NASA sites http://pioneer.gsfc.nasa.gov/public/iml/ and /public/aiml/
there isn't much current activity at least on the public pages.   I seem to
recall that Michael Richmond attended a meeting a few years ago on this and
wonder if he or anyone has heard that AIML is gaining supporters or projects
and should it be considered for TASS?  (of course it won't have a chance on
BAIT, KAIT or whatever it is now, and that's the code that Michael adapted
for his instrument).

-ron

Ron Wickersham

en Wed, 24 Oct 2001, Chris Albertson wrote:

> Two developments I just found out about.  This will be old news
> for some.
> 
> 1) "Pyraf".  It appears that IRAF will leave the 1980's and
>    make a jump clean into this century.
> 
>    Quoted from http://pyraf.stsci.edu/
> 
>     "PyRAF is a new command language for IRAF based on
>      the Python scripting language. It is useful both for
>      interactive data analysis and for writing analysis
>      scripts. PyRAF coexists with the current IRAF CL;...."
> 
> 2) Support for the Macintosh
> 
>    "...We are happy to report that with the upcoming
>     V2.12 release ... we plan to support Mac OS X..."
> 
> See http://iraf.noao.edu/macport.html for the full text.
> 
> This means that people not wanting to invest in a UNIX
> workstation from Sun, or DEC, or install Linux on a PC can
> run IRAF on a plain off the shelf box that can be bought
> retail.  In fact I would I'll go farther and say that the
> best computer in terms of price, power, and ease of use
> for astronomical data reduction will be the Apple dual CPU
> G4 Macintosh. 
> 
> The PC still wins in terms of cost for those willing to
> build a system and come up a steep learning curve and
> the Sun Starfire 15000 (see
> http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/sunfire15k/ )
> wins in terms of raw power.  But the G4 Mac 
> (see http://www.apple.com/powermac/ )is an off the self
> consumer level product that comes with a pre configured OS
> and should be able to run IRAF and MS Office together on
> the same screen, somethingnoother platform can claim.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> =====
> Chris Albertson 
>   Home:   310-376-1029  chrisalbertson90278@yahoo.com
>   Cell:   310-990-7550
>   Office: 310-336-5189  Christopher.J.Albertson@aero.org
> 
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