[Plplot-devel] A substantially modified version of example 31

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

Hi Andrew:

Would you please have a look at the results for a substantially modified
31st example that I put together in python?

The principal changes from your implementation in C are as follows:

(1) I took all your pre-plinit tests and spanned them between pre- and
post-plinit to check if the device driver molested any of the values that
were specified.

(2) All "get" values are output to stdout before each test so it is easy to
see when things go wrong and see what tests have been run.

(3) I massaged some of the set values to be more unique (i.e., to
make sure there was no confusion between x and y values, and to avoid
zero values and unity values).

Immediately interesting results are two of the tests failed because of some
screw-ups in the python interface.  So exposing those interface bugs
immediately justifies this effort. However, the fix for these issues was not
at all obvious to me. Could you have a look to see whether you can spot what
is wrong?

Since I could not make quick fixes, I commented out the plexit() and
continued with further tests in each of these cases.  Once we sort out what
is wrong with the python interface, then those commented commands will have
to be uncommented.

One of my motivations for (2) above was to insure the same tests were run
for all languages since currently we have no knowledge of that except by 
reading through the various example 31 implementations. However, a
comparison between stdout results (presumably for examples 1 and 23 as well
which also output to stdout) would need some extra machinery in the compare
ctest.  Would you be willing to implement that?

If you (or anyone else) wants to do any more changes to how the existing
tests are done in xw31.py or add some additional tests to that example,
please feel free. Once we all agree that xw31.py is perfect, I still think
we should delay propagating it to the other languages until a day or so has
gone by to make sure we don't have any more bright ideas.

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); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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