This is the latest stable release of PDL. You should always use it for serious work. As it is on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network it should automatically choose a site close to your location. Binaries for the most popular linux distributions are available (see next column).

Windows versions (ppm) of post 2.2.1 snapshots for use with activestate perl 5.6 are available (with and without BAD value support). Look for the latest zip archives in the list of released files. Tim Jenness has also made PGPLOT (used for 2D data display) available. The PGPLOT module still has some problems. Check this message for details.

The latest source code is available via CVS, so you can always check out the latest developer snapshots. Compressed tar archives of the most recent snapshot are available for those who want to save dealing with the hassle of CVS. Please notice that these snapshots can be distinguished by a lack of documentation and may contain very new and untested code. But that's life at the leading edge...

PDL is a Perl module, so it's really useful if you have it installed on your machine :-) For the recent stable versions you need at least Perl version 5.6.1 to succeed. Version 5.8.x is preferred.

If you want to have a nice command line with history function in your perldl shell install one of the Term::Readline::XXX modules.

To read and write images with PDL's rpic/wpic commands the module PDL::IO::Pic is in the main distribution. However, if you want to have access to nearly every possible graphics format you should have installed one of these packages before installing PDL. For a jpeg converter you should also have libjpeg.

PDL::IO::Pic has also the wmpeg function to write MPEG videos. This packet is needed to activate it.

Slatec fortran lib is included but requires a fortran compiler and the perl module to be installed. Module will not be built unless ExtUtils::F77 (version>= 1.03) is installed and Extutils::F77 supports your platform.