arxt@tank.uchicago.edu (patrick palmer) (10/26/89)
I think it is time to grumble again about the lack of a scientific plotting package for the Amiga. Anyone who does numerical calculations would find it very helpful to be able to plot columns of of numbers against each other. I do this frequently on a Sun workstation, and we ought to be able to do it on an our Amigas. Let alone getting final results, it speeds up debugging enormously to be able to write out a file of columns of numbers, plot any column against any other column on the screen, fiddle with the plot parameters, change to one column against the log of another, etc., and if you want to, print out the plot for your notebook. I have a decent A2000 system, an HP Paintjet printer, but I cannot do the above described analysis. There is a program called supermongo - whose source is in C - which a friend (who is a very good programmer) estimates would take 3 months of his spare time to port to the Amiga. I would certainly pay $100 - $200 for a version of supermongo that could print on my Paintjet (drivers are hopelessly beyond my programming capabilities). How many people like me are necessary to make it worth someone's while to do this? 100 sales would amount to $10,000 to $20,000, so if half goes to "overhead" someone could make $5000 to $10000 for 3 months of spare time work. There must be at least that many people out here who would pay. 100 sales is only one per 10000 Amigas now. (I do not care whether or not it is an actual port of supermongo, there are a number of packages of similar functionality - I am not even clear on the copyright status.) Another issue is the effect on sales of accelerators and programming tools for Amigas were such a plotting package available. I have tried a number of plotting packages that are available, and they help, but they do not do everything I want for rapid inspection of results or for making nice copies. For people like me, it is pretty dumb to compute things I have to upload to a Sun at work to look at. But, if I could be selfcontained at home, the picture would be very different. Beyond my own interests, it seems clear that the existence of such packages is necessary before several classes of potential users will take the Amiga seriously. As a TeX workstation, Amigas certainly shine. But if they cannot do any of the other tasks that workstations are often used for, the chance for expanding the market into new areas is limited. Pat Palmer (email: ppalmer@oddjob.uchicago.edu)
jac@muslix.llnl.gov (James Crotinger) (10/26/89)
Interesting timing. Yesterday my boss introduced me to Cricket Graph on the Mac. Now that is one really neat program. Why isn't there something like it for the Amiga? (Is there something like this for the Sun?) I'd certainly buy something like this if the interactive stuff worked as nicely as Cricket Graph does, and if it made nice looking plots. There is of course the plplot library, which is pretty impressive. So you can always write a little C program to plot your data (or REXX with the newest version...could even write an editor macro to let you edit the datafile and send it to plplot from the editor, allowing you to do some semi-interactive stuff). But this lacks the nice interactivity of Cricket Graph. Do any of the Amiga Spreadsheets have the ability to make good scientific graphs? They'd need to be able to do scatter and line plots, and to do log scale axes.
tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns) (10/27/89)
> Do any of the Amiga Spreadsheets have the ability to make good scientific >graphs? They'd need to be able to do scatter and line plots, and to do >log scale axes. >---------- SuperPlan can do scatter and line and lots of other plots. Hmm-I don't think it does log scale axes directly: but you could apply an exponential function to a column of numbers and plot the result on a linear axis. Output is at full resolution of the printer or (HP-GL) plotter. MaxiPlan can do scatter and line plots, but at least the old version (MP+) couldn't output in better than screen resolution (I understand MPIII does full printer resolution and offers better control of annotation than they used to; SuperPlan allows good user control of annotation position, size, font, color, etc.)