Hi, earlier this month Joe Harrington posted this: NASA's immediate objective will be a complete data-analysis system to replace IDL, in short order, including an IDL-to-python converter program. That shouldn't be hard as IDL is a simple language, and PyDL may have solved much of that problem. I'm an IDL user, and I'm currently trying to see if I can switch over to python. It strikes me that an IDL-to-python converter program is a VERY ambitious idea. While IDL's syntax is rather similar to Python, and less powerful (so that there is less to translate), there are enough differences between them that conversion is probably not a simple task. For example, in IDL: arguments are passed by reference array storage order is different there's a different notion of "truth" than in Python a structure type exists, and a notation for slicing arrays of structures trailing "degenerate" array dimensions are truncated in a hard-to-predict way array subscripting generates copy, not reference I'm sure there are some other big differences too. Then there is major functionality in IDL that is missing in Python. * (Like plotting. :-) It's hard to translate a routine when you have nothing to translate it to. I've looked at PyDL. It seems a nice little crutch, and it makes the learning curve a little shallower for people converting from IDL to Python. It's very far from being a complete translation from one language to the other. I don't know what Joe had in mind for a converter program. One that took care of braindead syntax conversion, while leaving the more difficult issues for a human programmer to translate, might not be too hard and could be pretty useful. I think it would be a bad idea to hold out for something that automatically produced working code. my $.02 (worth only $0.0127 US) Mark Fardal University of Victoria * I'm stuck in Python 1.5 until the New Year, so have yet to see what SciPy has to offer. Maybe SciPy-Sumo is getting close.