[citation needed] IDL shares a common syntax with PV-Wave and originated from the same codebase, though the languages have subsequently diverged in detail.
Hence part of the art of using IDL (or any other array programming language, for that matter) for numerically heavy computations is to make use of the built-in vector operations.
The predecessor versions of IDL were developed in the 1970s at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
At LASP, David Stern was involved in efforts to allow scientists to test hypotheses without employing programmers to write or modify individual applications.
RSI sold its first IDL licenses to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in 1979.
[1] Stern and Ali Bahrami rewrote IDL for Unix on the Sun 3, taking advantage of the re-write to extend and improve the language.
Subsequently, IDL was further expanded and ported to several variants of Unix, VMS, Linux, Microsoft Windows (1992), and Mac OS (1994).
The first version of ENVI, an application for remote sensing multispectral and hyperspectral image analysis written in IDL, was released in 1994.
Currently, amongst other applications, IDL is being used for most of the analysis of the SECCHI part of the STEREO mission at NRL, USA, and at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK.
The single namespace is particularly problematic; for example, language updates that include new built-in functions have on occasion invalidated large scientific libraries.
Please report software that does not have such a license to your account manager or sales representative.As of August 2023[update], the statement has not been tested in a court of law.