[Plplot-devel] Re: plgriddata and Directory Changes README! [was: Re: [Plplot-devel] Next release]

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

On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, [iso-8859-1] Jo=E3o Cardoso wrote:

> | I agree, but you did not answer my question, probably because I made
> | a typo. Here I go again: Can't you cast the values returned by nn/csa
> | with PLFLT?
>
> No, data arrays are passed by reference. With nn/csa/qhull array data
> flows in both directions.
> If the user wants to use floats because he has huge amounts of float
> data we would have convert it all back and forth. And the main user
> concern, memory space, would be jeopardized anyway.

I take your point about memory space, but users may still want
single-precision to work as a convenience because their application
programme is inherently single precision.  We do serve the scientific
plotting community, and there is still a large number of fortran
single-precision applications around (as I am just re-discovering in my
current contract). It is extremely convenient to be able to use PLplot
directly from such a large application without having to do anything specia=
l
with the precision of the PLplot arguments (or the inconvenient alternative
of writing the results to a file which is then read by a special
double-precision PLplot application).

Thus, I hope very much that you do make an effort to completely support bot=
h
single and double (by allocating the space, copying the arrays, etc.) just
as in the rest of PLplot.

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 softwar=
e
package (plplot.org).

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Linux-powered Science
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