QuoteOriginally posted by: PolterExSan: I think they're for different kinds of applications -- MathGL is a library for interactive plotting (interactive from the point of the program that the library is linked to) -- i.e., you can make and control the plot as the data gets produced by the program (an on-line plotting, in a sense). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the primary application of Gnuplot is off-line plotting, i.e., it takes a pre-generated data file as an input and produces a figure as an output? Instead, a library (like MathGL, but can be any other) shares the data with the process directly via sharing the same memory.// The best you can do is to emulate this behavior (on-line plotting) in Gnuplot would be via piping commands, e.g.
http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/faq.html#SE ... 0000000000 -- but I imagine using this for (soft) real-time graphics would be abysmally slow (possibly why Octave is switching to OpenGL/FLTK). What is interesting and would allow Gnuplot to be used for the on-line plotting is the modification by John Campbell mentioned in the above-mentioned link -- but it seems to be abandoned.Read the interview, it's not bad as an intro:
http://www.floss4science.com/interview-mathgl/Indeed previuos versions of Gnuplot need data previously generated ie. "off line ploting". Current version of Gnuplot 4.5 allows "piping comands". I have tested this and the result is satisfactory. this is when you are in a windows environment. In this context Linux +Gnuplot + C/C++ is much more powerful, I have seen some examples