From help-octave-request  Wed Feb 17 14:53:45 1993
Subject: Re: plot problem 
From: John Eaton <jwe>
To: bardo at ief-paris-sud dot fr (Bardo Muller)
Cc: help-octave
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 93 14:53:42 CST

: octave:11> out=[x,sin(x)]
: out =
: 
:  1 0.841471
:  2 0.909297
:  3 0.14112
: 
: octave:12> plot(out)
: Cannot open load file '-'
:          line 0: (No such file or directory)
: 
: What is wrong ?

What version of gnuplot are you using?  Did you change the value of
the global variable gnuplot_binary?

Octave executes a modified version of gnuplot (normally installed in
${prefix}/lib/octave/notgnuplot).  The modified version recognizes a
final argument of `-' to mean that it should display the gnuplot
prompt after executing commands from all other input files.

I think this is useful since it allows one to use the gnuplot commands
to modify the appearance of the plot.  It would be nice to also have
some of this functionality available at the octave prompt, but that
would mean duplicating a lot of the gnuplot code.

Plotting should be much better by the time 1.0 is released, but I
haven't worked on it much yet.  Suggestions (or code :-) are welcome.

jwe