Re: Sideways violin plots in one plot cmd?

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

Ethan A Merritt <me...@uw...> writes:

> I guess I still don't get it.
> Since the wrapper can pass in any necessary set of commands,
> why not just pass in the commands that do the double plot?

Because my tools would then need special-case logic for this one case. I
would need some sort of "feedgnuplot --violin" and logic internally to
handle it. At the very start I decided that explicitly supporting
everything gnuplot supports with such special-case logic would be
extremely effortful and extremely error-prone and maintenance-full. And
I avoided the issue entirely by passing user-specified strings to
gnuplot transparently. Which works great for most styles.

If (as a random example) I have 3-column input that I want to plot as
errorbars I can do this:

  < 3columns_datafile feedgnuplot --domain --tuplesizeall 3 --with yerrorbars

feegnuplot then knows to be dealing with 3-values-per-point data, and
tells gnuplot to plot with "yerrorbars". There's no special-case logic
for "yerrorbars". And I don't want to create a separate path for violin
plots.

Full disclosure: there IS one special-case path to deal with histograms.
But those are extremely useful, and worth violating the general design.
violin plots aren't nearly as ubiquitous, and I dont want to add a big
special-case path for them.