Statistical functions and procedures in IDL 5.6 and 6.0

This work presents the results of assessing the accuracy of statistical routines as implemented in the IDL platform, versions 5.6 and 6.0 for Windows XP and Linux. This is “a complete computing environment for the interactive analysis and visualization of data. IDL integrates a powerful, array-oriented language with numerous mathematical analysis and graphical display techniques (Research Systems Inc., IDL Versions 5.6 for Microsoft Windows, 2003 and 6.0.1 for Linux x86 m32, 2004. URL http://www.rsinc.com)”. It is shown that, though it is an excellent platform for signal and image processing and analysis, it has flaws when statistical computing is concerned, mainly when dealing with non-linear regression by least squares fitting and, in particular, when computing in single precision floating point.