David and all- I think it is time to resolve the PDL graphics problem, "this missing link" by getting a basic, standard capability for PDL.
I propose the standard display graphics for PDL be based on the Prima graphics toolkit by Karasik et. al. and the current code for PDL::Graphics::Prima by David Mertens. A start would be to review the common usage of PGPLOT, PLplot, and Gnuplot to come up with a Top 10 of use cases to implement. They should be *very* simple to use and have smart defaults so the common case versions of the Top 10 can be done in 1-line or less. :-) Motivation/justification: * More beginning PDL users thanks to the PDL Book and the increasing buildability and usability of PDL on all platforms. It makes it more glaring that we don't have a good, common, default graphics. * Alien::XXX development has not matured enough to allow easy use of PLplot and PGPLOT and it is arguable that we want the base display graphics to be readily available from perl/CPAN which Prima is. * The use of Prima will provide an easy to use, default GUI environment for more sophisticated and user friendly PDL applications. * If we could get that base graphics up and running for the next point release (which will include the new NiceSlice filter engine and 64bit indexing) we would have a compelling platform for future growth. One downside, I am not prepared to push this effort through as I'm pretty busy working to make time for the final 64bit index development and the new NiceSlice engine support (the missing piece is the ability to use NiceSlice in an eval such as the pdl2 or perldl shells. I'm hoping that David might be willing to spearhead this development and maybe hold off on the Core diving for a bit. At any rate, I think the time is right for this to happen and the sooner the better. Thoughts, comments, "volunteers"? --Chris _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
