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[DanRRight]

You all know that I was waiting for this compiler to be 64bit for many years. And you know why. Many codes need all possible tricks to fit them into 32bit space. While i am waiting for final touches to be added (the debugger in 64bit mode, the Simpleplot to work) my codes sometimes remind me that they often live by themselves. That what i call devilry. Today i woke up, looked at the screen and what i got was totally shocking: wow, the results are totally corrupted, and when plotted what the devil's horns they generated instead of typical standard nice looking x-ray spectra? And how color appeared on supposedly black and white palette plot ? I suppose Silverfrost will soon complete the compiler which will help me to switch to 64bit and perform all so needed "exorcism" from my too small arrays and hell know how working stack. Otherwise it might be that i will need to seek another help. Devious or medical

[mecej4]

Dan,

A three-horned Mr. Devil? Or are you now into doing root-canals on alligators? Yikes! "Keep mouth fully open, please, while I pass this needle through!"

Please share the secret recipe that you use for including images inline in your post. Just yesterday, I needed to do this in another post:

http://forums.silverfrost.com/viewtopic.php?t=3290

Thanks.

[DanRRight]

Mecej4, Yea... I'm also kind of puzzled about third horn/tooth

Posting is easy, it's just few clicks work and is totally intuitive. You basically do not need my instructions. But just in case since the first time is most difficult part of any easy job:

1) go to Postimage dot org. I use it for years. You can post anonymously but being registered gives you control over your images which you can delete or reload/edit later on. This was the entire trick of posting images most people fail because anyone expects one obvious thing that this forum will accept and keep the image. Well, it will not hell know why, the disk space now cost nothing
2) click on "choose image" ("browse" on old website) button on their website. The popped up menu will allow you easily browse your computer for images. Click on desired image.
3) Postimage will then upload it and give you many different options for the possible links used on different forums and websites. I take "direct link" option to post here. Do highlight it and save it in your clipboard: Ctrl+C.
4) Now go to your forum, this one or any other, and click on "Img" button while you are writing your post in the forum. This will automatically place the HTML tag to include the image. You can also do that manually (I can not write these few letters since this will influence the current post misformatting it)
5) Ctrl+V image link there
6) Click on "Img" button again to close the HTML image placing command (or again write the same with slash manually)

[mecej4]

Thanks for the recipe, will try next time I want to include image.

[mecej4]

For a slightly different view of Excel, see

https://oit.utk.edu/research/documentation/Documents/ExcelStatProbs.pdf

or Google for "Friends don't let friends use Excel for" .

In the hands of many, Excel can be the easiest and fastest tool -- for making a mess.

[DanRRight]

The Simpleplot (i am talking about %pl only) actually was almost ~95% close to be ideal production quality simple plotting software when it was abandoned and worst of all left then Salford with no sources.

I wrote already with the examples what was left to do to make %pl to compete with Matlab, Mathematica, OriginLab and Excel

1) make all real*8 otherwise it crashes with numbers larger then 1e25
2) adjust a bit default fonts, their sizes and positions
3) add for X and Y axis one more standard design - square (4 axis instead of 2, see pictures below)
4) make it know that the initial data is changed and replot without reload
5) Add Y_Max same way as Y_Min
6) make other small fixes and additions like font size and line width which currently are external

Ideally Simpleplot could be made interactively adjustable by right clicking on the plot items and getting all settings in menu form (see pic below). There you can change axis parameters, fonts, line widths and their styles, colors and even the plotted data itself. The parameters then would be saved and next time this plot will automatically use these settings. Or share them among all other plots. All parameters in Settings menu have to be graphical, not textual.

See? What left to adjust is almost nothing, 95% of major work is already done. it is not acceptable anymore to plot the crappy way by hand on transparencies or using poor quality software like Simpleplot.

But i actually almost done all that myself with the help of you guys here, including you, John. Things are that Simpleplot uses character variable as its online settings. So instead of hard program it inside the source like this

[DanRRight]

It is better to show ones then to say 100 times. Here is what i meant that has to be added for %pl to be ideal. On top is its settings which are invoked when you click on anything on the plot. For experienced programmers like Silverfrost this is just a month or two of work

[JohnCampbell]

Mecej4,

I find the criticism of Excel statistics a bit (lot) of a beat-up !
If you are suffering from round-off errors in Excel standard deviation calculation, which uses 64 bit precision, perhaps the criticism should be directed at those using a poorly constructed data-set rather than the computing tool.

As for the regression criticism, I wonder what R-squared was. Probably 0.1.

Excel is a very good tool to get a rough idea of what the data looks like. I regularly use pivot tables to review data and identify potential relationships.

I remember in 70's, someone complained that a competitors Finite Element program was useless because for a particular calculation it (effectively) used (length**3) / length, rather than use length**2; when the real problem was that in their modelling, they used element lengths that were totally unsuitable. They also used 32-bit precision in their comparison.

This supports the claim that statisticians can lie with statistics.

John

[mecej4]

That critical article is dated 2001. The criticism in it probably applies to Excel '97 or the next version (2000?). I have faint memories of reading a more recent article that reported (item by item) issues that were fixed in later versions of Excel.

Early NA texts used the running update of the mean and STD of a time-series as a good test case to show that mathematically equivalent formulae can give substantially different finite-precision results, and emphasized the need for accumulating sums in double precision even when the data was all single precision.

[DanRRight]

John,
Things are that doing %pl improvement is really easy. I have done many of these things myself on my own plotting routines despite my zero initial experience and general reluctance to lose time on that

It is definitely not hard in example above the top Settings menu appears when you click on axis or its text. And the right settings menu - when you click on the lines plotted. In my own routines I can easily move axis left and right, up and down with mouse without any menu by simultaneously pushing CTRL key, chose palettes, output parts of image in text format, chose preselected designs etc. All in one click. The switch to stunning looking surface plot or 3D OpenGL plots is also just one click away in my case if the same data is 3D.

For Silverfrost this could be just an easy work with a lot of fun. It will bring so needed gloss and shine on the compiler. Throwing Simpleplot out of the table and substituting it with own graphics routine will take few month more but with current state of stubborness or something else hell knows what of Simpleplot developers we all have no choise

Of course if binding to Excel is easy to do - why not implement this too?

But my position is that we use coding in Fortran to get almost total control on what we do. This is why instead of using Excel etc i also made %pl - based easy visualizer of simple XY data. It does not look as cool as Excel because Simpleplot looks like a @#$%. If %pl would be perfected like in the example above (and it could be even better with gradient and picture backgrounds and some other beautifications like grid lines, 3D axis, color scales etc) no one would want to use Excel for quick look at the data or even more serious work.

And by the way some time in the past Excel was considered a threat to security due to its hacking vulnerabilities. Same was with the JavaScript. The Security department were recommending to switch them off or remove. Not recommended was clicking on Russian and Chinese sites. But currently no one cares about security and privacy anymore, everything is blatantly hacked, JavaScript is ON by default, Russian sites and Chinese internet commerce sites and cellphone apps are used even more then any others and no one cares.

Unfortunately i spend my time to do all that graphics stuff my own way from ground zero. Without graphics i often can not even find the errors.

Silverfrost would improve graphics capabilities professionally and do that 10x faster.

[DanRRight]

And also such design would be nice to see in the future plotting utility

[LitusSaxonicum]

Dan,

Just out of interest, have you tried Simdem?

Eddie

[DanRRight]

Eddie, No...looks ugly like simpleplot.

My idea is to make simple powerful and professionally looking %pl utility which is doing main basic things in one line and the graphs look suitable for any journal publications (like for example Matlab is producing) not the whole graphics package.

For anything else seems the only way so far is to use own made graphics packages.

I am sure with time such thing will be made - we have good experience with %pl and some experience making good looking graphics. We just need to combine these two. Even school students of the authors of Simpleplot made superb graphics utility for Android which costs a dollar or two. If they would devote some time to improve their buggy crappy %pl...

[DanRRight]

If the graphics package sources are freely available and they are still not abandoned by the authors then it is potentially possible to try to beautify the plotted graphs. If this works and the output meets the one single strict requirement to look as good as Matlab/Mathematica/Excel/Originlab then I do not see why not substitute limpy primitivus Simpleplot in ℅pl with this other package. Or add another independent Clearwing control for it.

[PaulLaidler]

Thanks for the comments. We are now at a point where we can consider our options regarding a 64 bit %pl. The issue has not been forgotten but other things have taken precedence. At the moment I am not in a position to be able provide a time scale