Re: [Fwd: Gnuplot: MAX_NUM_VAR in src/syscfg.h]

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

On Saturday 04 June 2005 05:00 am, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> > On Wednesday 25 May 2005 05:03 am, Lars Hecking wrote:
> >> may I ask to advance the #define'd compile-time parameter
> >>      MAX_NUM_VAR
> >> in src/syscfg.h from 5 to something like 20 or so?  :-)
> > How about changing these arrays to hold dynamically
> > allocated pointers instead.  [[...]]
>
> Is it worth complexifying the code to save 1K bytes of memory?

No. But that isn't the motivation.  The idea is to make
parameter allocation dynamic, so that we don't have a hard-coded
maximum number.  I was just pointing out that switching to 
dynamic allocation would save space as a side benefit.

> Does current gnuplot still run on MS-DOS 16-bit systems?

There was some debate about this during the runup to releasing
version 4.  As currently organized, the code is too big for
16-bit DOS.  This could be fixed without too much trouble
by splitting out large chunks of driver-specific data into separate
files.  However, we took a poll at the time, and turned up not a
single user interested in a 16-bit version. So we didn't bother.
As it happens, I favor breaking out at least the PostScript
prolog code into a separate file anyhow so that it can be 
customized to fit the needs of a specific site without recompiling
gnuplot.  But I am told that introduces installation problems under
MSWin because there is no convention for where applications
should place or look for associated data files.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington 98195-7742