On Feb 1, 2010, at 12:53 , David MacMahon wrote: > I think I have accomplished the changes described in the thread > quoted below. I still have some testing to do, but I'd appreciate > any comments on my approach. Preliminary testing shows negligible > (i.e. undetectable) effect on performance.
Not to toot my own horn, but I thought I'd add some more comments about this. I think the ability to use arbitrary storage of user data has many benefits, including: 1. FORTRAN arrays need not be transposed before passing to C functions. 2. It allow for not only the arbitrary of arrangement of the data, but also for arbitrary types of data since each element is returned by a user-defined function which can cast each element as needed to type PLFLT. This provides a path towards supporting both single and double precision user data in the same library, as well as integer user data, half precision user data, etc. More generally, the user defined function can transform each point for plotting. For example, the user data could be complex, but user-defined operator functions could be used to treat the data as just the real component, just the imaginary component, magnitudes, or phases. Another potential use of transformation operator functions would be to facilitate log plots. And, of course, the user data need not even be stored; it could be computed (e.g. fractals). 3. Simplifying interfaces with other libraries. For example, the GSL library has its own two dimensional data type (i.e. matrix). It also supports "views" into existing matrices (i.e. submatrix) with various stride options. By providing a small set of GSL-aware operator functions, pointers to GSL matrices and even GSL matrix "views" could be passed directly to the PLplot functions that accept operator functions. IMHO, the benefits are compelling enough and the apparent performance hit negligible enough that it could be argued that providing similar behavior for 1D data would be worthwhile! Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Planet: dedicated and managed hosting, cloud storage, colocation Stay online with enterprise data centers and the best network in the business Choose flexible plans and management services without long-term contracts Personal 24x7 support from experience hosting pros just a phone call away. http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
