Hello all, First, some context to explain my arrival in your in-basket: I have had more than enough of Microsoft's slowly breaking my long-standing code; escape from Windows has gone from a long-term backup plan to urgency to reality in need of cleanup around the edges. Many fellow travelers have happily switched to Macs, but I have an interest in building strange hardware; Linux is the logical choice. I am an avid user and advocate for the Smalltalk programming language and IDE. Pharo (http://pharo-project.org/home) has emerged as a very nice cross-platform Smalltalk with attractive licensing and goals close enough to mine that I can make progress.
Initially, I was building new things in Pharo and falling back on Dolphin Smalltalk and Windows for number crunching and batch graphics. An interface to gnuplot was handling ad-hoc graphics fairly well, at least for small data sets. The time came to start to handle larger data sets on Linux, and gnuplot bogged down. Initially led to believe that gnuplot would take only text input, I started to retrofit binary transmission of data to it, but it has been very tedious to make it work. Annoyances mounted and I began looking for alternatives. Alan was kind enough to indulge me in some early questions via private email. In that exchange, I provided some initial reactions to PLplot's interface and documentation. A few highlights: (1) functions do not return error codes; instead they hijack stdout; I strongly urge returning zero on success and providing information about errors using distinct non-zero error codes (2) function names are cryptic. Call it a failing of mine, but I can barely tell them apart. It will soon be inconsequential to me, because I will use my Pharo binding (which I will release when it is worth having) and forget that the C functions exist, but I think for new arrivals, a set of intention-revealing names would be far superior to current names. It reduces the value of the documentation and the examples - what does plscol() do again? Is that color or column? My 2 cents, and I doubt I'm alone. (3) saving graphs to files is critical, but it should be optional. It has been difficult to get a clear picture of whether/how well one can draw into memory. Please see below. (4) it would be really nice to have something that takes an array of function values, a starting x/time value and an increment and draws a polyline. I created something to create the x array in memory, but there should be a way to skip that step. Apologies/thanks if I missing the obvious. Is anyone using plsmem()? Using files for every plot I want to see is going to get old. Temp files, sure, but it's messy and should be avoidable. Any terse advise or success stories (as validation that it can work) would be greatly appreciated. I have hopefully figured out how to use sub-plots. I see how to label the axes on the subplots, at least the simple way. How does one put a title over a grid of plots to identify something they have in common? Is there a way to label a common x or y axis (for a column or row)? Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-general mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-general
