Re: new package: gri, a language for scientific graphics programming.

[miller5@uiuc.edu]

>>>>> "Andreas" == Andreas Tille <tille@physik.uni-halle.de> writes:

    > A friend of mine pointed me also to a third program which
    > does the job.  It could be found under

    >    http://www.triumf.ca/people/chuma/physica/homepage.html

    > and seems me work looking at it and also packaging.  I
    > didn't have the time to try it more deeply but a short look
    > was impressive.  The friend switched from gnuplot, which he
    > was happy about quite a while, to physica.

I've used physica for years and recommend it highly.  It has some
quirks (it started life as a VMS program), but I find it to be
very useful for producing publication-quality plots.  It is also
relatively platform independent (VAX/VMS, Alpha/VMS, Digital Unix
(both 3.x and 4.0), DECstation/ULTRIX, SGI/IRIX, SUNOS, Solaris,
HP-UX, IBM-AIX, and PC Linux and (preliminary) Windows9x) and
device independent (X11, postscript, tk4010, ...).

I've considered packaging Physica, but the source is not
available, so it would end up as a simple installer program in
contrib.  Since there are only a handful of files and
installation is very simple, it doesn't seem to me that a package
would be that useful.

Mike

-- 
Michael A. Miller                                miller5@uiuc.edu
  Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign