To James and Andrew: I am switching this discussion to the plplot-devel mailing list for obvious reasons.
On 2013-11-21 15:08-0000 James Tappin wrote: > When a program using plplot is run without a device specified (or with an > unknown device), the program produces a list of devices and prompts for a > device. > > Is there any way to get that list to a program (e.g. to put them into a > selector widget, or to find available print-like devices)? [Preferably to > Fortran]. @James: I think you are looking for plgDevs, see line 3404 and below of src/plcore.c. We have never bothered to propagate that function to other languages, but before discussing that, I have an API question for Andrew. @Andrew: Could you take a critical look at the API of this function as well as plgFileDevs (the equivalent of plgDevs which is restricted to returning a list of file devices). I am no API expert, but it makes absolutely no sense to me that the first two arguments of these functions have types of const char *** type. Surely the type should be char ** for returning an array of character strings? Anyhow, we use a variant of char ** for the pllegend arguments involving arrays of character strings which is why I spotted this issue. It appears to me the current API means that an extra & and a special cast has to be used in the call, see plgFileDevs( (const char ***) &plFramePtr->devDesc, (const char ***) &plFramePtr->devName, &ndev ); in plframe.c, for example. Anyhow, if you decide to change the API of plgFileDevs and plgDevs (with a lowercase renaming as suggested below if you think these functions should be propagated to all our languages), then it should be done now (to give us several weeks to test the result) or delayed until after our next _stable_ release. @James: Once the API question is answered (and changes made if it turns out my concern with that API is a legitimate one), then there would be considerable work needed to propagate plgDevs (and presumably plgFileDevs) to other languages. To get an idea of what is involved, I suggest you look for every instance in the source tree of pllegend, a function that has been recently propagated to all languages, appropriately documented, etc. So for example, the work would start by lowercasing plgDevs and plgFileDevs everywhere they occurred, and #defining the following macros in include/plplot.h #define plgfiledevs c_plgfiledevs #define plgdevs c_plgdevs I would also look very carefully at how the const char * const *text input array of character strings for the pllegend argument is handled in bindings/f95 to get some idea of what you would have to do for the corresponding case of an output array of character strings. Anyhow, thanks for your question which leads to some interesting further questions to discuss. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Shape the Mobile Experience: Free Subscription Software experts and developers: Be at the forefront of tech innovation. Intel(R) Software Adrenaline delivers strategic insight and game-changing conversations that shape the rapidly evolving mobile landscape. Sign up now. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=63431311&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
