Hi all: It seems to me that there are several disadvantages to PGPLOT: -- ugly internals, hard to modify -- Difficult build, requires FORTRAN + C -- Non-free license -- No longer being developed
PLplot has made great strides lately--I've very impressed by the hard work of its developers. It does not have the disadvantages above. What are the features of PGPLOT which are not in PLplot? My suspicion is that the reason people like PGPLOT when used with PDL has more to do with the PDL interface (which is well developed) than the PGPLOT library itself (which has the problems I noted above). PDL::Graphics::PLplot is behind PDL::Graphics::PGPLOT in many ways, but my guess is that PLplot is ahead on PGPLOT in most ways. Regards, Doug Hunt [email protected] Software Engineer UCAR - COSMIC, Tel. (303) 497-2611 On Thu, 29 Oct 2009, Diab Jerius wrote: > > > On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 20:34 -0600, Craig DeForest wrote: >> Yep. The only real question remaining for Tim J is whether they got a >> viral Free style license (e.g. the right to bundle it with Starlink >> under the GPL), in which case forks are explicitly allowed. >> >> (Mobile) >> >> >> On Oct 28, 2009, at 8:22 PM, Frossie <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> >>> Tim Jenness wrote on October 28: >>> >>>> >>>> It's a bit fuzzy but about 20 years ago Starlink were given >>>> permission >>>> to distribute PGPLOT. There was a big brouhaha at the time. At one >>>> point Starlink reimplemented PGPLOT in terms of GKS but in the end >>>> everything was cleared up and "native" PGPLOT was officially adopted >>>> by The Starlink Project and they were allowed to put it in all their >>>> source code and binary distributions. >>>> >>>> Now, given that was a long time ago I have no idea whether Starlink >>>> were given written permission to tweak PGPLOT away from Tim's >>>> original. I can probably ask someone who was around at the time. >>> >>> Note that TimP does not hold the PGPLOT copyright - CalTech does. Even >>> if they had made some written arrangement with Starlink, it is >>> extremely unlikely that it would cover us. >>> > > > XSPEC (http://heasarc.nasa.gov/docs/xanadu/xspec/) ships with a modified > PGPLOT library (uses "real" PostScript fonts) that seems to have been > forked many years ago. > > > _______________________________________________ > Perldl mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl > _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
