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I have found something that doesn't seem quite right to me with regards to the IDL 8.0 garbage collector.
If you have a function that returns a pointer array and you try to tuck that call into another function call (n_elements for instance) the pointer gets freed before the second function call completes. Here is an example program that I wrote to show my problem...
function createPointerArray
compile_opt idl2, logical_predicate
data = ptrarr(3)
data[0] = ptr_new(indgen(10))
data[1] = ptr_new(indgen(10))
data[2] = ptr_new(indgen(10))
return, data
end
pro testGarbageCollector
compile_opt idl2, logical_predicate
; The return from createPointerArray gets destroyed before the n_elements call is complete
print, n_elements(*(createPointerArray())[0]) ; Prints 0
data = createPointerArray()
print, n_elements(*data[0]) ; Prints 10
end
Am I missing something? Is this expected behavior? It seems to me that you should be able to do this. It would just be extra unneeded code to store the return into a variable just to be able to access it. I use code like this a lot and I can't afford to update it everywhere.
Please help!
Thanks
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