Support for PGPlot in Octave

[Vinayak Dutt]

Hi Octave Users:

 I have been toying with the idea of supporting PGPLOT library for Octave
for quite some time. I have looked into various graphics libraries and after
looking into many of these (PGPLOT, PLPLOT, PLOTMTV, GNUPLOT etc),
I find that PGPLOT seems to have quite a lot better graphics support and
hence I am looking into PGPLOT as graphics support for Octave.

The way I plan to support PGPLOT is as follows:

* Construct  a C extension to Tcl (through a command "pgplot") which can
   be used to call any of the 90+ or so functions in the PGPLOT library.

   This extension is pretty low level: that is, it just provides one-to-one
   correspondence to the PGPLOT library function. This is similar to
   the perl extension: pgperl, but as perl does not do interactive thing
   I am going for Tcl. Besides I like Tcl-Tk :-)
   Also as this is an extension to Tcl shell, higher level functions
   could be contructed in Tcl script and thus one could also possibly build
   a good command line interface to PGPLOT like gnuplot.

* Construct a lot of .m file functions to support equivalent higher level 
functions
   to support this Tcl extension in Octave. Once the pipe support in Octave
   is done, this would provide a neat interactive graphics for Octave.

So how does this sound to you ?

-Vinayak

PS: I have already started working on the Tcl extension.  As I use Tcl I find 
that its
      so neatly coded that writing a new command for it seems so easy. Anyway, 
this
      will take some time as currently I am busy about defending my PhD thesis 
:-)

/*
 * vinayak dutt
 * graduate student, ultrasound research
 * mayo graduate school, rochester mn
 *
 * e-mail: address@hidden
 *         address@hidden
 *         address@hidden
 *
 */
#include "disclaimer.h"