Re: [gentoo-science] gnuplot + python

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Matías Graña wrote:
> Hi; I'm doing some easy 3D plotting these days and I've come to this
> situation. I just need to plot a few dots in 3D-space. I've been using
> gnuplot for this, as it allows to rotate the picture with the mouse,
> giving a good impression of where the dots actually are.
> So far so good, but now I want it to interact with the python code I use
> to compute the position of the dots. There's gnuplot-py for this, but it
> seems to have the problem that once it launches a window, gnuplot does
> not listen to mouse clickings on it. So I can tell my python program to
> draw the dots, but then I can't rotate them as I could within a gnuplot
> session.
>
> So, I'm looking to either
> a) a way to have an interaction between gnuplot and python, or
> b) another program/library that can be launched from python and able to
> plot 3D dots and rotate them with the mouse.
>
> Any insight or advice is welcome.
>
> Thanks,
> Matías

There are oodles of scientific interfaces to Python. I'm guessing there
is at least one that will do this. I'm not a Pythonista, however, I'm a
Rubyist, so I can't give you any names, or tell you whether what you
want to do is in Portage or not. One you might want to check is Sage
(http://sagemath.org/). Another is StatPy
(http://www.astro.cornell.edu/staff/loredo/statpy/)

However, this is a very common mode of interaction in exploratory data
analysis, and just about every statistics package out there can do this.
xlisp-stat used to be in Portage, but it's in Lisp. And R is in Portage
for sure and is what *I* use to do this sort of thing. If you don't mind
learning another language, I'd recommend R.

There is supposedly an R-Python interface available, but since I don't
know Python, I've never bothered to check it out. If you want to go this
way, do a Google search for "RSPython".
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