interactive-gnuplot

An extremely lightweight wrapper around a Gnuplot process.

An Example

The main entry point is the gnuplot macro. For example, the Gnuplot program

set samples 400
set title "Example" font ",20"
plot [-10:10] real(sin(x)**besj0(x))

can be expressed as

(gnuplot
  (:set :samples 400)
  (:set :title "Example" :font ",20")
  (:plot (fragment "[-10:10]") (fragment "real(sin(x)**besj0(x))")))

which renders as

Using The fragment-syntax readtable

For convenience, we provide a readtable fragment-syntax which allows fragments to be delimited by curly brackets, so that {foo bar} is read as (fragment "foo bar"). Using this, we may rewrite the above example as

(named-readtables:in-readtable fragment-syntax)
(gnuplot
  (:set :samples 400)
  (:set :title "Example" :font ",20")
  (:plot {[-10:10]} {real(sin(x)**besj0(x))}))

How it Works

interactive-gnuplot manages a Gnuplot process. Commands, specified as Lisp strings, may be executed via execute-command.

Commands themselves may be built from gnuplot-fragment objects, which may be concatenated to make a complete command. The generic translate-to-fragment has methods which convert Lisp objects into fragments, and gnuplot-command-string applies this to a list of objects. As an example:

INTERACTIVE-GNUPLOT> (translate-to-fragment :foo)
#S(GNUPLOT-FRAGMENT :STRING "foo")

INTERACTIVE-GNUPLOT> (gnuplot-command-string (list :plot (fragment "foo") :with "bar" 3))
"plot foo with \"bar\" 3"

The gnuplot macro is just a friendly wrapper over this. The above example expands to

(PROGN
 (EXECUTE-COMMAND (GNUPLOT-COMMAND-STRING (LIST :SET :SAMPLES 400)))
 (EXECUTE-COMMAND
  (GNUPLOT-COMMAND-STRING (LIST :SET :TITLE "Example" :FONT ",20")))
 (EXECUTE-COMMAND
  (GNUPLOT-COMMAND-STRING
   (LIST :PLOT (FRAGMENT "[-10:10]") (FRAGMENT "real(sin(x)**besj0(x))")))))