Am Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:22:07 +0000 schrieb Invisible:

> It's nice that you can load it up and say "plot exp(-x**2)" and it
> immediately plots something. (The alternative being to open Excel, make
> an X column, fill it with suitable values, write the formula into a
> cell, copy it down, select the column, run the chart wizard... are you
> bored yet?)
> 

Well, right tool for the right job...

> As soon as you want to do anything even moderately complex, it becomes
> an utter nightmare. The documentation is minimal to say the least.

Nah - the build in help covers everything, but I give you that some stuff 
is really hard to find.

> The
> properties have utterly unintuitive names and no logical grouping. And
> half the time it seems to be actually impossible to make it plot the way
> you want it to.
> 
> On top of that, while the expression language is great for plotting
> explicit functions, it's useless for plotting anything else. Even
> something as trivial as a recurrence relation is beyond its power.

I don't know what exactly you want to do, but googling for "recurrence 
relation gnuplot" came up with this nice mandelbrot fractal:

http://t16web.lanl.gov/Kawano/gnuplot/fractal/mandelbrot-e.html

That's already a quite old version of povray and I guess you can do more 
stuff with newer versions - I think the most difficult part is telling 
gnuplot what you want to do.

But I guess the stuff gnuplot is really good at is plotting data 
(experimental results or computer simulation results) and it does a good 
job at this. Usually we write the program putting out data ourself, so if 
gnuplot likes spaces instead of commas as separator its usually not a big 
deal (And then there is awk and such stuff ;)). It is not made for the 
data processing itself, that is usually done outside of gnuplot (even 
though you can hack quite some stuff in it).

> 
> Now, if only it would support CSV input... You know, the de facto file
> format for all numerical data? Yeah. :-P

I think it does? See

http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/docs_4.2/node173.html

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