[Haskell] Re: 2-D Plots, graphical representation of massive data

[karczma]

Glynn Clements proposes to: 

> Zabiyaka, Yuliya
who wants
...
>> 2) display result of the analysis (pie charts, histograms, plots) 
> 
> If you don't need to interact with the display, the simplest solution
> is to generate graphics files. Personally, I would use PostScript, as
> I'm reasonably familiar with it and the Ghostscript interpreter is
> freely available.

Well, more than often proposing another *language* to process raw data
might be an overkill. I wouldn't dare to suggest that somebody learns
PostScript just for that. At least it was what I understood from Yuliya
request for a Matlab 'plugin'... She needs rather a high-level processor
with all the visualisation goodies, than another language.
But who am I to answer on behalf of other people?... 

I think that the original idea - to generate raw textual data and read
them by Matlab is the simplest one. Almost nothing to do from the Haskell
side, just to output a file, in free format.
 From the Matlab side - use fscanf or textread.
And then invoke your pies, exploded or not, or hist, or rose or whatever.
I did it several times, since I like to teach computer graphics and
image synthesis using functional languages, but the final nice image is
hard to make with Haskell (though, in Clean a bit easier, sorry for
advertizing the competitor...) 

Of course, there is always the wish to have the One which Rules Them All.
For example use directly some graphic packages available for Haskell,
e.g., wx. But this is an extremely heavy enterprise... Even Daan Leijen
did not provide many good examples. 


Jerzy Karczmarczuk