IDL (programming language)

IDL, short for Interactive Data Language, is a vectorized, numerical and interactive programming language used for data analysis and for processing large amounts of data, including image processing. It is popular in astronomy, atmospheric physics and medical imaging. Its syntax includes many constructs from Fortran and some from C, and it originated from early VMS Fortran. IDL grew out of vector-oriented calculator programs written in the 1970s by David Stern at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Stern founded Research Systems Inc. in 1977, and its first product was IDL for the PDP-11. The language is dynamically typed, compiles to an interpreted stack-based intermediate p-code, and offers a basic form of object-oriented programming. It shares a common syntax with PV-Wave, and free implementations such as GNU Data Language exist. IDL was acquired by NV5 Geospatial in April 2023.