Axis rescaling: [was: Re: Quick refresh [was: q for quit in plot windows]]

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Thursday 28 June 2007 12:56, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> 
> > Dan: <<I think it doesn't get us in the direction we want to go, which is
> > to eventually store the data, all of it, and then just reuse it in whatever
> > way we see fit.>>
> > 
> > Please give a concise example of what you mean.  How would it be different
> > from what we are already doing?  What part of "all of it" are we failing to
> > store?
> > 
> Let me illustrate the difference by discussing the drawbacks of this macro:
> 
> #define STORE_WITH_LOG_AND_UPDATE_RANGE(STORE, VALUE, TYPE, AXIS,	  \
> 				       OUT_ACTION, UNDEF_ACTION)	  \
> ...
> 
> There is too much going on there.
> Here is the problem with doing the range adjustment and logarithm upfront.
> 1)  The logarithm is especially egregious.

I think everybody agrees on this.  At least, I don't recall hearing a
dissenting opinion.  My request was simply that you leave the existing
log scale code in place until a general mechanism was ready to replace it.

But that's not an issue of failing to store input data; it's an issue of
whether you apply axis scaling upon input or wait until later.

I thought maybe you were proposing that the keyword "every", for example,
should be ignored during input and only applied later on.  That would be
a bad idea IMHO because the whole purpose may be to avoid input of 
the entirety of absurdly large data files. 

> You may ask Why run the generated function data through preparation?  

The CVS code can already do this.
See "help datafile special" for a description of the '+' pseudofile.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt