This discussion bears on an unfortunate liability of traditional API's --
their quick obsolescence when new features / capabilities are brought online.
Back when I was into generating a lot more types of plots than I do now, I
even built my own front-end to plplot to control many aspects of the plotting.
A lot of it was tied to my own personal needs so I never felt comfortable
folding it into the library proper.  Anyhow, one thing I found very useful was
to control via state variables instead of functional ones.  That is, I had
calls

 xxsetf( "foo", <value of float parameter foo> )

that allowed an arbitrary amount of control with no API change necessary.  I
think the number of settable parameters I had may have been in the 100's
range, but it's a bit fuzzy now.  Didn't have to worry about obsoleting that
API very often after that.  So something to consider.

-- 
Maurice LeBrun

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