What's New in IDL 8.7.1

New Features
Updates
Library Updates
See Also

For links to What's New information for other IDL 8.x releases, go to See Also.

New Features

IDL Machine Learning

The new IDL Machine Learning framework provides a powerful and flexible way to run machine learning applications on numerical data. You can create and train models and apply them in classification, clustering, or regression. For example:

IDLmlAutoEncoder implements an autoencoder model that can be used for clustering purposes.
IDLmlFeedForwardNeuralNetwork implements a Neural Network model that can be used for classification purposes.
IDLmlKMeans implements a K-means model that can be used for clustering purposes.
IDLmlSoftmax implements a Softmax model that can be used for classification purposes.
IDLmlSupportVectorMachineClassification implements a Support Vector Machine model that can be used for classification purposes.
IDLmlSupportVectorMachineRegression implements a Support Vector Machine model that can be used for regression purposes.

For a complete list with links to all of the functions and classes of the framework, see IDL Machine Learning.

For details on how to get started with IDL Machine Learning, see The IDL Machine Learning Framework.

IDL Package Manager

The IDL Package Manager (IPM) allows you to create, install, update, and remove IDL packages. IDL packages are a collection of files and/or folders that are compressed into a ZIP file; they can contain any combination of IDL pro code, IDL save files, and/or IDL DLMs, and they contain an idlpackage.json file that describes the package. Packages are installed to the directory defined by the new IDL_PACKAGE_PATH preference, and the IDL path is automatically updated to include the new files.

The following libraries are available to be consumed:

Library	IPM Command to Install
IDL-Motley	ipm, /install, 'https://github.com/hadfieldnz/idl-motley'
IDL-ROMS	ipm, /install, 'https://github.com/hadfieldnz/idl-roms'
IDL-Salvaggio	ipm, /install, 'https://github.com/csalvaggio/IDL_RIT_Salvaggio'
IDLdoc	ipm, /install, 'http://packages.idldev.com/idldoc.zip'
Mankoff	ipm, /install, 'https://github.com/mankoff/kdm-idl'
mglib	ipm, /install, 'http://packages.idldev.com/mglib.zip'
mgunit	ipm, /install, 'http://packages.idldev.com/mgunit.zip'

CW_COLORGRADIENT Function

The CW_COLORGRADIENT function creates a compound widget to create color palettes built as gradients interpolated between a series of user-defined colors.

DIALOG_COLORGRADIENT Function

The DIALOG_COLORGRADIENT function allows you to interactively define a color table as a gradient interpolated between a series of user-defined colors.

Updates

ARRAY_EQUAL DIFFERENT_LENGTHS Function and NAN Keyword

The ARRAY_EQUAL function has a new DIFFERENT_LENGTHS keyword, which allows comparing arrays of different sizes on the common indices. It also has a new NAN keyword, which treats NaN values as being equal.

IDLTask Schema Property

A TAGS property was added to IDLTask to help categorize tasks. Because of this update to the task template, the task schema key is now idltask_1.2.

JSON_PARSE Performance

The JSON_PARSE function performance has been improved. Performance improvements will be most noticeable when parsing larger files, where the process will be up to 10 times faster.

Library Updates

The IDL Python bridge now supports Python 3.6.6, 3.5.6, and 2.7.15
The IMSL library has been updated to version 2016.1.0
The JRE library has been updated to version 1.8.0_181
The libcurl library has been updated to version 7.61.0
The MrSID library has been updated to version 8.0.0.3101
The OpenSSL library within cURL has been updated to version 1.1.0h
The SQLite library has been updated to version 3.24.0
The Xerces library has been updated to version 3.2.1

Product	IDL

Version	9.0