GDL

GDL may refer to:

Computing

Other

GNU Data Language

The GNU Data Language (GDL) is a free alternative to IDL (Interactive Data Language). Together with its library routines, GDL is developed to serve as a tool for data analysis and visualization in such disciplines as astronomy, geosciences, and medical imaging. GDL is licensed under the GPL. Other open-source numerical data analysis tools similar to GDL include GNU Octave, NCAR Command Language (NCL), Perl Data Language (PDL), R, Scilab, SciPy, and Yorick.

GDL as a language is dynamically-typed, vectorized, and has object-oriented programming capabilities. GDL library routines handle numerical calculations (e.g. FFT), data visualisation, signal/image processing, interaction with host OS, and data input/output. GDL supports several data formats, such as NetCDF, HDF (v4 & v5), GRIB, PNG, TIFF, and DICOM. Graphical output is handled by X11, PostScript, SVG, or z-buffer terminals, the last one allowing output graphics (plots) to be saved in raster graphics formats. GDL features integrated debugging facilities, such as breakpoints. GDL has a Python bridge (Python code can be called from GDL; GDL can be compiled as a Python module). GDL uses Eigen_(C++_library) numerical library (similar to Intel MKL) to have excellent computing performance on multi-cores processors, with better benchmark than IDL on large matrix operations.