Re: Missing/invalid data points

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

Ethan Merritt wrote:

> However, I think we very definitely should fix the currently broken
> behavior of
> 	splot 'foo' using 1:2:3
> in the presence of nonsense or NaN strings
> Unfortunately, I have not found a simple fix for this yet.
> I can make it work, but only be substantially re-writing the 
> input code in datafile.c.

I propose it should be a post 4.2 major redo.  Again, I suspect that not a lot of thought was put into the original behavior for this and any documentation came about as an after thought.  We'd want to keep as much compatibility as possible but I'm guessing that if people had a really nice flexible alternative they'd be happy enough.

Recall, I also raised the issue of flexibility to define how the "datum" should act when finding a "missing" point.  Some times one would like to increment, some times not.

>   The presence of the binary read
> routines is an additional complication. 

I think the binary case can be addressed after the fact, once a nice set up is done in ASCII.  We can have analogous concepts, e.g., specifying that a certain number represents "missing", or "NaN", etc.  (This is something that people often do in practice, e.g., in a data stream they might define 0x8000 of a 16 bit number to represent something special, say saturation.)

Dan