WARNING: There is absolutely no warranty for this software package. See the file COPYING for details. This is a beta version working up to 2.0 of PerlDL. ----------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT! WHAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR HANDS IS A BETA VERSION OF PDL 2.0 GET PDL 1.11 FROM CPAN IF YOU WANT A STABLE VERSION FOR GENERAL-PURPOSE USE! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Blurb ----- The perlDL project aims to turn perl into an efficient numerical language for scientific computing. The PDL module gives standard perl the ability to COMPACTLY store and SPEEDILY manipulate the large N-dimensional data sets which are the bread and butter of scientific computing. e.g. C<$a=$b+$c> can add two 2048x2048 images in only a fraction of a second. The aim is to provide tons of useful functionality for scientific and numeric analysis. Installation ------------ Please read the file INSTALL for information on how to configure and install. Once you have built PDL and either installed it or done 'make doctest', try perl -Mblib perldl to get the interactive pdl shell. In this shell, 'help' gives you access to PDL documentation for each function separately and 'demo' gives you some basic examples of what you can do. Notes ----- Directory structure: Basic/ - The stuff that PDL would be no use without Lib/ - The stuff that PDL would still be useful without but which makes PDL even more useful Graphics/ - The stuff that PDL needs to make pictures IO/ - The stuff that PDL needs to write and read strange files The new organization makes it possible in the future to make "PDL-Lite" (just the Basic/ directory) if that seems necessary. This distribution has parts at different levels of completion - usually they are marked in the docs but here is a brief rundown of what is good and what is something you need to know what you're doing to use: Basic/ should be fairly stable. Graphics/PG works, should be stable Graphics/TriD works, but some of the interfaces might still change. Lib/Opt/Simplex works Lib/PCA.pm, ICA.pm, PCARout, DataPresenter These are alpha stage. Don't use if you don't know what you're doing Lib/Slatec Should in principle work but porting is difficult. If you can't compile it, remove it from Lib/Makefile.PL IO/Misc Stable, expected to work IO/FastRaw seems to work & be stable. Comments are welcome - so are volunteers to write code! Please contact the developers mailing list perldl@jach.hawaii.edu (subscription address: perldl-request@jach.hawaii.edu) with ideas and suggestions. Tuomas J. Lukka (lukka@fas.harvard.edu) Karl Glazebrook (kgb@aaoepp.aao.gov.au) Acknowledgement --------------- m51.fits is included as a demonstration by kind permission of IRAF group at the National Optical and Astronomical Observatories, in particular Pat Schweitzer, who retain ownership.