Non-Graphical User Interfaces

If your application requires little interaction from the user and runs in a full IDL installation (that is, if your user has a licensed copy of IDL and can use either the IDL Workbench or the IDL command line version), you may not need to create a graphical user interface at all. For example, if you have created a simple program that requires the user to enter a small number of data values and returns a numerical result, you may not want the overhead of a graphical interface.

The READ routine allows you to use the IDL command line to prompt the user for values, providing a record of both the prompts and the values entered in the Console view. See READ/READF for details.

This kind of textual interface behaves identically on all systems that run IDL and requires very little programming, but it does require that a licensed version of IDL be available. Applications using graphical interfaces can run using a runtime IDL license or in the IDL Virtual Machine, neither of which requires that the application's end user have a full IDL license.