Plotting Using PLPlot

[Fawzi Mohamed]

On 2009-05-10 21:23:48 +0200, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> said:

> It seems like there's substantial interest in this.  Please give me some use
> cases, i.e. what would you personally use this for, and what do you 
> foresee others
> using it for, so I can start thinking about what the API should be.  I 
> need a wide
> variety of use cases because, if I design the API based only on my personal use
> cases, it will end up being geared entirely toward histograms, scatter 
> plots, and
> line graphs because that's what I use regularly.

yep me too, well 3d surface plots would also be nice to have, but I can 
live without.

> Besides use cases, here are some specific questions:
> 1.  Is there any need for an OO-based API, or should I just use free functions?

I would use an OO API where one window/image/output graph is 
represented by an object, and then you have functions to

> 2.  Does anyone have any use cases where plotting is performance critical, or
> should I just keep things simple/stupid in terms of the performance/simplicity
> tradeoff?

keep it simple I would just send dense arrays to it (which are close to 
the C api), and then have utility functions that convert ranges,... to 
dense arrays, but maybe I am biased because I have a good library to 
handle dense arrays.
I would say that a reasonable goal is that the library could cope 
directly to plot of 1'000s of points at least for the simple 1D plot 
types.

Fawzi