Plotting Using PLPlot

[dsimcha]

== Quote from Fawzi Mohamed (fmohamed at mac.com)'s article
> 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.

Ok, this is way less than I had in mind.  When I said high performance, I was
thinking like, either plotting stuff under realtime constraints like if you're
some Wall Street bigwig plotting zillions of charts to figure out what stocks to
buy or, when doing summary stuff like histograms, handling billions of points read
as a range from a file, i.e. more data than you have address space.  I personally
would not consider anything that couldn't gracefully handle at least a few million
data points for histograms and a few 10s of thousands for scatter plots to be good
enough.