Re: Sideways violin plots in one plot cmd?

[Dima K. <gn...@di...>]

Ethan A Merritt <me...@uw...> writes:
>
> I don't get it. What is it about the shell interface that would prevent you
> from doing exactly what is in violinplot.dem?
>   set table $datablock 
>   plot ...
>   unset table
>   plot $datablock ...

Both gnuplotlib and feedgnuplot work as very thin wrappers around
gnuplot, where they pass strings directly to gnuplot without knowing
what the strings mean. This allows those interfaces to support lots and
lots of styles, while containing no code that makes those styles work:
all the logic is inside gnuplot itself. The double-plotting in
violinplot.dem is qualitatively different than pretty much every other
gnuplot style, so I would need to add special-case support for it. I
COULD do that, but I really don't want to: the really simple API of
feedgnuplot and gnuplotlib is a feature, and this special-case path
would dilute that feature.

In a perfect world we'd be able to make violin plots like all others:
with some "set" commands (that don't have the data in it) and a single
plot/splot command that is given data. That is sounding like a big
project inside gnuplot, though.