[Haskell-cafe] type dependency

[Chris Kuklewicz]

Henning Thielemann wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jul 2006, Donn Cave wrote:
> 
>> After reasonable success with an FFI exercise, I have run into a
>> typing issue that has me stuck.
>>
>> The foreign software is a C plotting library that my colleagues
>> use, really simple and mostly quite amenable to Haskell-ization.
>> The one fly in the ointment is the graph coordinate type, which
>> is a union of double & int64.  The graph object has switches for
>> the actual type of x and y coordinates, set at creation time.
> 
> Will you make that plotter wrapper public?
> 
> I rolled my own GNUPlot wrapper some time ago:
>  http://darcs.haskell.org/htam/src/GNUPlot.hs

About gnuplot (which I use a lot).

When I saw the GSL Haskell wrapper was using calls to gnuplot to print, I went 
looking for how to make gnuplot behave better as a middle-end instead of back-end.

I made a new output terminal device for gnuplot that wrote a description of the 
plot drawing commands.  Thus I opened a pipe in haskell and invoked gnuplot to 
write to it.   The new output commands were interpreted by the usual "read" 
haskell command  into a list of data which I could then use the Cocoa bindings 
of gtk haskell to render in a window.

All the graphics and the basic text renders properly, but I ran into problems 
with extended text.  The main one being that gnuplot does not have a proper 
definition of the lexing/parsing of extended text.  The actual c-code that does 
the operation is not cleanly designed and the behavior conflicts with the help 
text.  But this was just a hobby exercise, so I have not quite finished it.

What I do have is something could accurately take the "demo" gnuplot into a 
stream of data/commands that could be rendered (via a handy monad) into a 
cairo/gtk window drawable that looks like the output of other terminals.

-- 
Chris