All -

It is with great pride and joy that I finally release the first alphas of
not one, not two, but three distributions to CPAN:

* PDL::Drawing::Prima - PDL bindings for many Prima::Drawable functions
* App::Prima::REPL - a first attempt at a grapical PDL workspace
* PDL::Graphics::Prima - 2D plotting library for PDL built on Prima

You can install all of these using standard CPAN methods. For example, at
your system prompt you could install PDL::Graphics::Prima like so:

  cpan PDL::Graphics::Prima

The only external dependency you'll need is a C compiler. If you've not
installed Prima before and you use Linux, you'll need your X11 dev files to
compile that module, too. (On Windows and Mac, if you have a C compiler,
you already have everything you need to compile Prima.)

PDL::Drawing::Prima uses the power of PDL's threading engine to
automatically perform the same drawing operation over many different input
values. PDL-threaded drawing operations take all applicable Prima drawing
properties as *optional* arguments, so that (for example) drawing a large
set of lines with the same color is nearly as simple as drawing a large set
of lines with different colors. It also adds a threaded symbol drawing
function that makes it easy to draw various standard N-gons like triangles,
pentagons, stars, and asterisks.

App::Prima::REPL is my first attempt at a PDL workspace that uses Prima. On
the spectrum of Perl/PDL work spaces, it is more user-friendly than the pdl
and pdl2 shells, but it is not meant for editing script files (it can, but
it's not great) and it is not nearly as sophisticated as Padre. It is
lightly modeled after my experience with Matlab and IDL, and it targets
potential users who would like to use PDL but who want the comfort of a GUI
interface. Actually, it does not require PDL::Graphics::Prima, or even PDL,
but if you later install them it will automatically load them for you.

PDL::Graphics::Prima is the root concept that spurred all these projects
and is PDL's first 2D plotting library written in Perl. (There are external
plotting libraries that have Perl/PDL bindings, but they are written in C
or FORTRAN, not Perl.) It is a highly interactive GUI plotting library with
many plotting capabilities and many more on the way. In particular, it has
capabilities to export images in raster formats and postscript output is in
progress. It is still quite young and compared with professional plotting
libraries it will have many limitations. However, I would love new ideas
and especially help in implementing them!

I promised to release this some time in February, so here it is. Although I
intend to be very responsive to questions and requests, I will be
particularly busy this week as I am attending the American Physical
Society's March Meeting in Boston, so please be patient waiting for me to
answer any questions you may pose. Also, I really hope that the
documentation is helpful, but I know there are some holes. I hope that it
is sufficient to help you get started. If not, please check the examples in
the source tarballs for PDL::Drawing::Prima and PDL::Graphics::Prima.

Please download, use, and let me know what you think!

David

P. S. If you're in Boston and would like to meet up, feel free to email me.
:-)
_______________________________________________
Perldl mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl

Reply via email to