Unintended consequences

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

My prime argument against the trend towards 
"programming features" (and data structures)
in gnuplot is the worry about unintended
consequences down the road.

I wrote up the little "play" (below) to
demonstrate what I mean by that. Of course
it's a satire, and therefore exaggerates
to make a point.

(I sent this before (30-Oct), but apparently 
it got lost somehow.)


Tongue-in-cheek, please! 

Here we go...


"All: I just implemented heredocs. Now we can bundle data and 
commands into self-contained command files. That should help 
so much managing the demo/ folder."

"I love it - it really cuts down on clutter in my directories."

"Dick - here is the data set we talked about. I know that you 
are a gnuplot user also, so I am not sending you the data as a 
text file, but as a self-contained gnuplot command file. Just 
load it into gnuplot and off you go! It is very convenient."

"John - here is the data set I got from Jim. He sent it as a
self-contained gnuplot command file. I know that you are not
a gnuplot user, but I am sure you can figure out a way to 
extract the data regardless. You got a PhD and everything."

"Help, my name is John. Somebody sent me some data as a 
self-contained gnuplot command file. What the hell am I
supposed to do with that?"

"Hello, John, and welcome to the gnuplot-data mailing list. 
Good news - we just implemented this new terminal "raw-data".
All you need to do is start gnuplot, load the self-contained 
command file that you got with "load", then set the output 
device using "set output filename" (where filename is the 
name of the file that you would like to export the data to), 
then set the terminal to "raw-data", then run "replot" and 
you are good.

"Oh, I see, that's really easy. By the way: why does gnuplot
have this odd notion of "data files"? Isn't that redundant
with the data section in the self-contained command files?"

"Yes, John, you are right. In fact, plain data files are a
deprecated feature in gnuplot 6; starting with gnuplot 6.2
we plan to only support self-contained command files. By that
time, we should also have finished our very simple and
convenient toolkit to manage self-contained command files."

"I have begun work on gptk (gnuplot toolkit) to handle our
convenient self-contained command files but it needs more 
work. I imagine something as simple and intuitive as Unix tar."

"I am almost done with gptk-cut (to extract the command part)
and gptk-extract (to cut out the data part), I also have made
good progress on gptk-paste, to add a data part to an existing
command part, but I am still working on gptk-list, which shows
an inventory of all data sets contained in a file."

"Well, the release date for gnuplot 6.2 has slipped again, 
mostly because I am not done with gptk-cut-binary to extract
the command part from self-contained command files that contain
a data section in binary format. It works for binary data sets
in PNG, but it does not yet work for the arbitrary binary file
formats that have been part of gnuplot since version 3.7 or
so and that we all agreed to allow inside of self-contained
command files when we prepared gnuplot 5.9."

"All - I just discoverd this new feature in the release candidate 
for gnuplot 7. I takes a plain text file (whitespace-separated
columns) and plots it. Of course it is not as powerful as
the self-contained command files that we all know and love,
but I find it amazing that I can now simply write data into
a file and plot it. I didn't know gnuplot could do that."