Re: Problem and solution: Patch for new "stats" command

[Tait <gnu...@t4...>]

>         http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~zov1/gnuplot/patch/stats.html

Forgive me for not actually looking at the code (yet), but a couple
questions sprang immediately to mind.

Mean as used here seems to be the arithmetic mean. What about the geometric
mean? (Or harmonic mean, or any of the other types of averages?)

Is the standard deviation calculated as for a population, or a sample? Is
there a way for a user to request the other?

I have always addressed these sorts of issues by using a tool that's
designed for manipulating arbitrary data sets (Perl in my case, but there
are others). This has the advantage of providing infinite flexibility,
subroutines, complex logical conditions, modules or libraries, abstraction
and re-use, and all those things that gnuplot doesn't have. The external
tool then generates output that's fed to gnuplot.

I wonder, rather than providing a restricted set of pre-defined functions,
is there a way to allow the user to provide a formula or expression that
will be applied across multiple rows? Then the user could calculate the
mean (whatever that means to their application) or standard deviation or
some other arbitrary metric on their own.

Tait