Re: 'with pixels' (was Re: Engines are started; ...)

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Ethan Merritt wrote:

> On Tuesday 13 July 2004 06:59 am, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> > > > Requirement for using specifiers always for plot ... binary would be rather
> > > > cumbersome. Current syntax is OK, e.g.
> > > > 	plot 'x.edf' binary with image
> > 
> > What's the problem with the above simple command? Why to do anything more?
> 
> I thought the binary mode was intended to handle all plot types,
> not just the new "with image".  Or have I got that wrong?
> If indeed it is to handle all plot styles, then it suffers from the same
> ambiguities as the non-binary form of plot commands.
> Simplest case:
> 	plot 'data' using 0:5 with lines	# y value is found in col 2
> 	plot 'data' using 5 with lines  # same y value is now found in col 1

That particular ambiguity could be fixed trivially in get_data().  All it
would take would be to convert 'using 5' into 'using 0:5' before any of
the datafile.c functions were even called.  The truly tricky ones are to
be found elsewhere, though:  acsplines, errorbars dy vs. ymin:max, and
explicit colour columns.

In a nutshell, we may already have piled too many new features on top of
the existing code base --- the foundation is starting to crumble.

> So I don't see how
> 	plot 'data' binary with lines
> is supposed to work unambiguously.

The same way it always did.  Actually, I think 'binary' with no using
spec should probably be reserved to mean the old gnuplot binary format,
if only for backward compatibility.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (br...@ph...)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.