[SOLVED] Error: "Keyword parameters not allowed in call."

Error: "Keyword parameters not allowed in call."

I am very new to IDL so forgive me if this seems dumb. I am trying to simply read a .tif image and let IDL show the image. My commands were:

IDL> a=read_image('frame_1.tif')
IDL> help, a

then I receive

A               BYTE      = Array[3, 560, 420]

IDL> plotimage ,bytscl(a)

But after I execute the last command, I receive "Keyword parameters not allowed in call."I don't understand what I did wrong. Any ideas? Thank you in advance.

Solution

I'm not sure what is going on, but one thing that seems to generate that error message is that IDL gets confused between arrays (which can use parens to index) and function calls. Try using strictarr before the call:

compile_opt strictarr

This will mean that you must use square brackets to index arrays and parens for function calls.

Note, that you have to put this into every routine (and at the command line) you are having trouble with.