Re: [Caml-list] Ocaml for Scientific computing

[Markus E L <ls-ocaml-2006@m-e-leypold.de>]

Jon Harrop wrote:

> On Tuesday 25 September 2007 17:11:31 Hezekiah M. Carty wrote:
>> The biggest problem I've faced with OCaml has been missing
>> libraries.  The data I'm working with is (almost) all in HDF format,
>> so I had to write my own library bindings for OCaml.  The other is
>> a library for plotting data...
>
> While this is a general purpose graphics library rather than a plotting 
> library, you may be interested in our hardware-accelerated vector graphics 
> library Smoke:
>
>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/smoke_vector_graphics/?ol
>
> Smoke makes it much easier to write visualization software.


Nothing against Smoke, but on a Unix/Linux platform it might just be
useful to use Ocaml to calculate the graphics data and pipe that to
another process, e.g. one of the well known scientific visualization /
graphing packages (starting with gnuplot, but there have been others
too). For practical work (not advertising), that spares one to do all
that tricky stuff like placing labels or ticks on the axis yourself.

BTW: What I'd consider a boon for scientific visualization, actually,
would be to output SVG to a file. Such an SVG file could be annotated
with a usual graphics editor like inkscape for publication: Very
valuable (if you don't need interactive visualization).

Regards -- Markus