NAME

perldl - Simple shell for PDL

DESCRIPTION

The program 'perldl' is a simple shell (written in perl) for interactive use of PDL. perl/PDL commands can simply be typed in - and edited if you have appropriate version of the ReadLines and ReadKeys modules installed.

e.g.:

% perldl
ReadLines enabled
perldl> $a = rfits "foo.fits"
BITPIX =  -32  size = 88504 pixels 
Reading  354016 bytes
BSCALE =  &&  BZERO = 

perldl> imag log($a+400)
Displaying 299 x 296 image from 4.6939525604248 to 9.67116928100586 ...

Miscellaneous shell features:

1. The command perldl -oo starts perldl in Object-Oriented mode. It does a 'use PDL::OO' instead of 'use PDL'. Whether this is a good idea remains to be determined. :-)

2. The shell aliases p to be a convenient short form of print, e.g.

   perldl> p ones 5,3
    
   [
    [1 1 1 1 1]
    [1 1 1 1 1]
    [1 1 1 1 1]
   ]

3. The files ~/.perldlrc and local.perldlrc (in the current directory) are sourced if found. This allows the user to have global and local PDL code for startup.

4. Any line starting with the # character is treated as a shell escape. This character is configurable by setting the perl variable $PERLDL_ESCAPE. This could, for example, be set in ~/.perldlrc.