Pipe command?

Another vague question.

My client wants to know if FTN95 can communicate with external programs.

He wants something like the unix pipe, to send information to another program. Specifically, to something like Gnuplot, getting it to plot some data.

I think he should just use Clearwin+ but that would mean time wasted learning how. He already knows Gnuplot, just needs to have FTN95 tell it what to do.

Roger

I'm not familiar with Gnuplot, so I looked on the web. As Gnuplot can be script driven, presumably all you need to do is to prepare the script and launch Gnuplot to use it.

You could do that using CALL START_PROCESS@ or START_PPROCESS@ (documented in FTN95.CHM).

If there is a windows version of Gnuplot you could send it a message via windows messaging - but you would need to know what messages it accepts and what its process name is.

Eddie

Is GNUplot still developed and supported ? Or it is completely abandoned? If it is still not a dead package then do anyone has any projections about its future (dead, dead in near future like with all graphics packages, unknown, someone will always support it, in the limit of time goes to infinity it will overcome and kill any other graphics packages)?

By the way, in addition to what Eddie said, if GNUplot can be installed and communicate like a server (GNU community is particularly good at this) there exist one nice way of communication via specific open port as this Fortran can issue a command to the server and server will issue it to GNUplot to plot it. I use this for my other software. You probably can this way run your code on your tablet in Hawaii and plot it on screen everywhere, in London or Alaska but i did not try this.

If GNUplot has a future someone should explore all these ways with this compiler and show us here. Most of GNUplot examples look like they were made on CGI monitor of IBM PC XT with 256K graphics. And 2D plots look particularly ugly so no single journal will take them for production (FTN95 can antialias lines for example so they look beautiful even in thumbnail size) but i'm sure they can be beautified nowadays. Nicer is done 3D (probably via OpenGL) which i might be interested too since my own similar software is good but unfortunately never finished (axis tics, numbering, contour plot numbering, etc are not yet done, no free time usually for anything like that).

And there is nothing difficult in making your own 2D graphs - you need mostly just two commands

1. DRAW_LINE@ (or draw_line_between@)
2. DRAW_TEXT@ Showing all fonts on computer, choosing and scaling them and scaling thickness of line and its properties (dash, dot line, color etc), antialising command are the other few, all are very easy, just single Fortran commands of very rich and ultimately user-friendly graphics library of this compiler

Thanks for the suggestions.

I've forwarded them to my client for his opinions.

Roger

It's should be possible to directly pipe standard output from Fortran program to Gnuplot.