I hate IDL

I've been working a little bit in IDL for this new project because all the data is in fits files, Alexie has a lot of code that is in IDL which we are using to handle the CFHT data.

Anyway, I spent all morning struggling trying to do very simple input and output from this stupid stupid language.

I learned a few things, and since I hardly ever code in IDL, I am sure I'll forget unless I write them down right now. So here we go:

1) Tag names

You can get the tag names from a structure like this:

tname = tag_names(struct)

2) Merging structures

You can merge two structures as follows:

str3 = create_struct(str1,str2,NAME='str3')

3) writecol bug

For some reason when I try to use writecol to write out data, if there are more that 6 columns, and I don't specify the format, it puts a return carriage in the middle of the data. This goes away if you specify the format:

thisfile = './qsosMergedInfo.dat'
writecol,thisfile, qsos.ra, qsos.dec, qsos.z, qsos.zwarning, $
qsos.flux_clip_mean[0],qsos.flux_clip_mean[1], qsos.flux_clip_mean[2], $
qsos.flux_clip_mean[3], qsos.flux_clip_mean[4], fmt='(f,f,f,f,f,f,f,f,f)'