Thanks for the pointer. I'm using v. 6 - but via the rust gnuplot crate rather than the script interface. It is convenient because the function can not be written in simple analytical form like in the example. But seems splot can take a datafile as input, so I guess I could use that.
Matlab/octave can do contour plots - for a classification problem (2D) it can be used to draw the decision boundary between two classes. With gnuplot I have resorted to calculating a fine grid and plotting the points - with a colour that indicates the class that point is classified as. Is there a "smoother" way of doing this?