The gset command

[John W. Eaton]

On 20-Feb-2007, pradipta mandal wrote:

| I am facing a problem in octave since a recent update of the package
| octave-forge. I didn't get the gset statement back. That's why I am facing
| difficulties for getting graphical output. Can I have the gset statement
| back ? Please help me.

The gset command is not coming back.  If you want to use gnuplot
directly (i.e., instead of using higher-level plotting functions like
figure, line, plot, etc.) in future versions of Octave, you will have
to deal with the details of communicating with gnuplot yourself, or
write data files and use gnuplot separately from Octave to plot the
data files.

There are several reasons for this change.

Having a close coupling between Octave and gnuplot has made it harder
than it should have been to implement Matlab-compatible graphics and
switch to a different toolkit for plotting.

Commands like gset and gplot were always misleading Octave users to
think they were communicating directly with the gnuplot command line
when that was not the case.  So people were constantly confused about
why Octave variables were sometimes (but not always) recognized in
gplot commands but never in gset commands.

At this point, my goal for Octave graphics is to support Matlab
compatible graphics functions.  I think that is what the majority of
Octave users would like to have.  Given that, I am not interested in
continuing to support the old way of plotting because I think we
should put our efforts toward other projects instead.

jwe