Re: pasting code into gnuplot

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

The light dawns.  Much that was murky becomes clear.

I have traced down the problem, and it is not quite where I thought
it would be.  It may even be fixable, although I have not yet worked
out how to do it.

On Tuesday 06 January 2004 00:32, Arnd Baecker wrote:
> Marking and pasting (with the middle mouse button)
> into a freshly started gnuplot session
> only the lines until `plot sin(x)` (inclusive)
> are accepted (i.e. pasted)

This is because the whole paste buffer is, ummm, buffered.
That is, all the text is sitting in one buffer somewhere.
Gnuplot starts working through it character by character,
and eventually reaches a point at which it knows that a plot
will be sent to the x11 terminal driver. It calls X11_init()  and
at  x11.trm line 738 we do

=09setvbuf(stdin, (char *) 0, _IONBF, 0);

This command changes from buffered to unbuffered input
mode, which would be OK, but.....
The current buffer contents are thrown away, and you lose
all the characters that have not yet been read in and acted upon.

So it isn't really a race. It's just that if we are going to
switch to unbuffered mode we should first make sure the
buffer is empty, or else store it elsewhere for later execution.

I don't yet see a trivial way of doing this, but it can probably
be done with enough work.

--=20
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center Box 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195