Re: various observations (added to list)

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:

>>Were you instead attempting to take the executed result of 
>>/bin/true (a 1) and place it in the input stream 100 times?
> 
> 
> Yes, and you are correct that the piped command I gave
> doesn't really do that.  So my piped command was garbage.
> But hey, it worked anyhow.  I really did test it; I just
> didn't spend enough time thinking about *why* it worked.
> OK, scratch that kludge. My overly-hasty mistake.

That magic happens some time.  Perhaps your /bin/true is a script file and doesn't have any non-ascii values.  Not important.

> 
> I think the idea of an in-line "isosamples NEWVAL" in the
> plot command is reasonable, but hardly a high priority item.
> I'd rather focus on bug-fixes.

I agree, the file-based kludge I can live with since there are several demos using rand() based off a file.

What would give the in-line isosamples more weight would be placing it in a larger context, not just for the purpose of solving this problem, which would be to have two surfaces with different grid sampling.  Now is that something worthwhile?  The choice of isosamples has something to do with the spatial frequency content of the plot.  A planar surface doesn't need a large number of isosamples, whereas other surfaces might.  So perhaps having multiple surfaces would warrant that (e.g., a plane cutting through another surface).

However, would two meshes of differing isosamples be a bad visual effect?

The latest attached patch is what I will offer up for now.  Rather than put the rand(0) in the plot command, I've used the datafile approach.  I acknowledge regenerating new data with the replot command is cool, but the reason to go with the former for now is that technically there is nothing wrong with the "put data in file then use that data in file" approach in principle (other than Notice: cannot contour non grid data!).  I've isolated the egregious method with comment, i.e.:

# A somewhat inelegant way of generating N random data points.  A future
# non-pressing plot-command feature addition may address this issue.
set parametric
set samples nsamp
set format "%8.5g"
set table "temp.dat"
plot invnorm(rand(0)),(1.0*scale/nsamp)
unset table
unset format
#


Dan