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

[Philipp K. J. <ja...@ie...>]

[snip]
>
> 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.

So do I, and I have found that there is a small set
of properties I calculate much more often than 
others. Those are pretty much those included in 
out stats command. The idea here is to provide a
convenience for the 80% case. If I want to do something
"fancy", or just anything that is special or unique to
one particular data set, I think it is much more 
appropriate to hack that up as an external Perl
script.

>
> 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.

That is an interesting suggestion, but obviously
goes in scope way beyond what we were attempting
here.

And I am not sure that I would want to see that in 
gnuplot. Gnuplot's strength is that it is JUST a 
plotting tool. Because of that, it is simple and 
straightforward (no need to deal with a command
language).

If you want statistical functions with general programming
capabilities AND graphics, use R. ;-)

>
> Tait
>
>
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