From owner-help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Mon Dec  2 14:22:20 1996
Subject: Re: Matlab ginput
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1996 14:22:03 -0600

On 29-Nov-1996, petravic at fndaub dot fnal dot gov <petravic@fndaub.fnal.gov> wrote:

: We faced this choice a few years ago in a differnt context. We "required"
: ginput()-like functionality, and could not choose gnuplot for the same
: reasons.
: 
: At that time we chose a package called pgplot. IT had the beneift of
: optaillying forking off an X handler, so our application did not
: need an event loop. This has served us very well, but integrating
: pgplot introduces it own blemish, as it is written in f77.

Most of the numerical parts of Octave are also written in Fortran, so
I don't think this is much of a problem.

I am planning to focus on graphics and GUI stuff for 2.1 and am
currently leaning toward plplot and Tcl/Tk, though I don't want Octave
to depend on either.  I am hoping to make it possible for people to
use whatever graphics and GUI tools they prefer, just by writing a
relatively small amount of C++ code.

jwe