Re: Jpeg in a .sav file

Dan Larson wrote:

> am I missing something here, in terms of IDL design?  Is there some
> philosophical reason why one *shouldn't* want to include an embedded
> image in a .sav file?

No.  I can't see any philosophical reason why and there are no general 
technical reasons why one couldn't do this.  I can't think of any 
specific technical hurdles for IDL except that it would (probably) 
require a change to the .sav file format breaking forward compatibility.

There are certainly cases where this would be useful.  Embedding logos 
or icons is one, or LUT's or...  Sometimes you want to distribute an 
application with data that is not accessible to the user so packaging 
them with image files or .dat files or even other .sav files isn't 
ideal.  Though without further changes to the .sav file format data 
stored in a "hybrid" format wouldn't be protected whereas now at least 
the data is obfuscated inside a function.

I doubt any of the reasons would justify breaking forward compatibility. 
  For the 10 users ITT makes happy, there will be hundreds bent that 
they can no longer load IDL 8 .sav files in their older versions.  So I 
think that variations on the hack I posted are going to be the only 
route, for now.

-Rick