Re: [Plplot-general] PLplot-5.2.0 has just been released!

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Mon, 20 Jan 2003, Robert Schwebel wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 12:12:39AM -0800, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> > To motivate you to try this new release, I should mention that the
> > python and java interfaces to PLplot are now much more complete
> > (thanks to swig).
>
> What's the state of the Perl/PDL interface?

I don't know about PDL since that is an independent effort (see Doug Hunt's
messages to this list right after PLplot-5.1.0 was released last year).

We do have a rudimentary perl interface as part of generic PLplot, but that
is unsupported at this time because its developer ran out of time to work on
it.  Personally, I think we should abandon that approach (which depended on
parsing the API from our DocBook API chapter) and go with swig instead. We
already have two swig-generated interfaces (python and java) to PLplot which
work very well.  Using the python interface as an example, I was able to
generate the java interface quite straightforwardly in about a week's worth
of work in December with no prior swig experience and very little java
experience.  As a consequence of this swig exposure I have become a big
convert.  Swig currently can be used to generate interfaces for 9 different
languages to C/C++ libraries.  So I am hoping we can generate a lot of
additional PLplot interfaces (including guile, scheme, ruby, and especially
perl) with swig.  Do we have a swig/perl interface volunteer?

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and
Analysis (www.cccma.bc.ec.gc.ca) and the PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org).

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