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From: Mike the Elder
Subject: Re: Invisible: PureData
Date: 17 Feb 2011 08:50:00
Message: <web.4d5d272da512efdb85627c70@news.povray.org>
Le_Forgeron <lef### [at] freefr> wrote:
> Le 14/02/2011 16:38, Invisible a écrit :
> > On 14/02/2011 03:17 PM, Warp wrote:
> >
> >>    You know what they say about opinions...
> >
> > They're like onions?
> >
> > No, wait, that's ogres...
>
> IIRC, opinions are like a**h*l*s... everybody get one...


Opinions are like anthills?


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From: Darren New
Subject: Re: Invisible: PureData
Date: 17 Feb 2011 12:46:10
Message: <4d5d5ee2@news.povray.org>
Invisible wrote:
> The list at the top of the page indicates that this doesn't include md5sum.

Sorry. It was in my history, and I'd recently (like 2 weeks ago) downloaded 
an md5sum.exe that works fine, so I thought that's where I got it. Generally 
speaking, "gnu win32" is an excellent pair of keywords for google to find 
such stuff.  Does the attached work for you?

> Most CAS systems I've seen are hard-wired for algebra, and many of them 
> have the transformation rules hard-wired as well. Mathematica is more 
> general than that.

I see what you mean, yes.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
  "How did he die?"   "He got shot in the hand."
     "That was fatal?"
          "He was holding a live grenade at the time."


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Attachments:
Download 'md5sum.exe.dat' (28 KB)

From: Florian Pesth
Subject: Re: Invisible: PureData
Date: 17 Feb 2011 18:34:41
Message: <4d5db091$1@news.povray.org>
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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From: Invisible
Subject: Re: Invisible: PureData
Date: 18 Feb 2011 04:18:10
Message: <4d5e3952@news.povray.org>
>> 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
>
> Well, right tool for the right job...

It also can do certain types of plot that Excel can't do at all. On the 
other hand, with Excel, if I want to change the font size of the X-axis 
labels, I just right-click it and press "format". Good luck finding out 
how to do that in GNUplot (or even *if* you can do that in GNUplot - it 
varies by OS and output target!)

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

Really *really* hard to find, yes.

>> 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

I have literally no idea how that's possible.

> That's already a quite old version of povray

Uh... POV-Ray?

> But I guess the stuff gnuplot is really good at is plotting data

Yes, that's really its design purpose.

Of course, the fact that this data was to be in THE EXACT RIGHT FORMAT 
or it refuses to plot anything isn't very helpful.

>> 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

All these years I've been using GNUplot and I've never once been able to 
make it plot any data from an external source. (That should tell you how 
good the documentation is...)

OK, so that's how you tell it to load CSV. Now how do you specify which 
columns to plot?


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From: Mike Raiford
Subject: Re: Invisible: PureData
Date: 18 Feb 2011 09:11:33
Message: <4d5e7e15$1@news.povray.org>
On 2/16/2011 10:20 AM, Invisible wrote:

>
> There's a reason most people don't write assembly any more.
>

It's called pipelined instructions with multiple simultaneous units that 
require operations in a certain order in order to be most efficient, and 
sometimes even a strategic NOP just to get the instructions to pipe 
properly. A compiler is faster at implementing these rules than a person.

-- 
~Mike


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From: Invisible
Subject: Re: Invisible: PureData
Date: 18 Feb 2011 09:16:54
Message: <4d5e7f56$1@news.povray.org>
>> There's a reason most people don't write assembly any more.
>
> It's called pipelined instructions with multiple simultaneous units that
> require operations in a certain order in order to be most efficient, and
> sometimes even a strategic NOP just to get the instructions to pipe
> properly. A compiler is faster at implementing these rules than a person.

This only matters if you're interested in performance.

If you're interested in reliability and maintainability, there's the 
fact that there is almost no machinery to stop you shooting yourself in 
the foot.

If you're interested in portability...


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From: Mike Raiford
Subject: Re: Invisible: PureData
Date: 18 Feb 2011 09:18:43
Message: <4d5e7fc3$1@news.povray.org>
On 2/17/2011 3:15 AM, Invisible wrote:
>
> Most CAS systems I've seen are hard-wired for algebra, and many of them
> have the transformation rules hard-wired as well. Mathematica is more
> general than that.

Underneath it all, Maxima is similar. Its all symbolic. Certain things 
have certain meanings. All functionality and rules are defined in 
libraries, it has a standard set that it loads when started that gives 
pretty standard algebra and calculus. Depending on how far down the 
rabbit hole you want to go, you can even from the Maxima command line 
give it instructions in Lisp.

-- 
~Mike


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From: Invisible
Subject: Re: Invisible: PureData
Date: 18 Feb 2011 09:22:28
Message: <4d5e80a4$1@news.povray.org>
>> Most CAS systems I've seen are hard-wired for algebra, and many of them
>> have the transformation rules hard-wired as well. Mathematica is more
>> general than that.
>
> Underneath it all, Maxima is similar. Its all symbolic. Certain things
> have certain meanings. All functionality and rules are defined in
> libraries, it has a standard set that it loads when started that gives
> pretty standard algebra and calculus. Depending on how far down the
> rabbit hole you want to go, you can even from the Maxima command line
> give it instructions in Lisp.

Many of these CAS programs have a parser written in C that snips up text 
and turns it into internal data structures. Then other C code does 
algebraic transformations such as collecting like terms and so forth. If 
you want to input something that isn't algebra, or expressions in a 
non-associative algebra... sorry, you can't do that.

Mathematica doesn't work this way. The core implements a transformation 
engine, and arbitrary precision math. Beyond that, the parser, the 
printer, the simplification rules, *everything* is Mathematica source 
code, which can be altered at will (if you're so-inclined).

I have no idea about the architecture of Maxima, but it wouldn't 
surprise me. There are advantages to doing it this way. (The main 
disadvantage is performance...)


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From: Mike Raiford
Subject: Re: Invisible: PureData
Date: 18 Feb 2011 09:41:38
Message: <4d5e8522$1@news.povray.org>
On 2/18/2011 8:16 AM, Invisible wrote:

>
> This only matters if you're interested in performance.
>

Why else would you use assembly?

> If you're interested in reliability and maintainability, there's the
> fact that there is almost no machinery to stop you shooting yourself in
> the foot.
>

There are plenty of languages that allow better maintainability.

> If you're interested in portability...

Assembly isn't portable by its very nature ;)

-- 
~Mike


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From: Invisible
Subject: Re: Invisible: PureData
Date: 18 Feb 2011 09:56:10
Message: <4d5e888a@news.povray.org>
>> This only matters if you're interested in performance.
>
> Why else would you use assembly?

Perhaps because you need to perform specific hardware-level operations 
that C doesn't support. (E.g., selecting a different processor mode or 
something.) There's usually a few bits of the OS written in assembly 
because they do very low-level stuff.

> There are plenty of languages that allow better maintainability.
>
> Assembly isn't portable by its very nature ;)

...which leads us back to my "there are *reasons* why nobody uses 
assembler any more". ;-)


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