Subject: ANNOUNCE: PGPERL - PGPLOT GRAPHICS EXTENSION AVAILABLE NOW FOR PERL5.
From: [email-masked] (Karl Glazebrook)
Date: 22 May 1995 09:30:40 -0500
Newsgroups: sci.astro.research,comp.lang.perl.announce,uk.org.starlink.software,comp.os.linux.announce

PGPERL - PGPLOT GRAPHICS EXTENSION AVAILABLE FOR PERL V5.

This is to announce the availability of my 'pgperl' plotting package
for perl v5.

This package provides an interface between the Perl language and the
PGPLOT FORTRAN library, a very popular package for plotting scientific
data widely used in the astronomical community. (As a glance through
any issue of the journals ApJ or MNRAS will confirm.)

The idea is to provide an interpreted language for PGPLOT to enable
complex diagrams to be developed more quickly and easily - I have
always thought that PGPLOT produced very high quality plots but at
great expense owing to the long compile/link/run cycle of F77 or C, and
have always wished for some kind of powerful macro language.

This is now possible using the elegant perl language, which is very
powerful for parsing data from files in a variety of complex formats.
All the pgplot graphics routines are available directly as perl
subroutines and the use is fairly intuitive to those who know PGPLOT
and perl.

pgperl was previously available as a special version of perl4, it is
now also available as a dynamically loadable separate 'PGPLOT' module
for perl5. More information and the software itself can be retrieved by
anonymous ftp from the following ftp sites:

ftp.ast.cam.ac.uk:/pub/kgb/pgperl/     (United Kingdom home site)
linux.nrao.edu:/pub/packages/pgperl/   (United States ftp mirror)

Source is provided, as well as binaries for the following
architectures: SunOS, Solaris, Linux, OSF/1.

There is also a WWW Home Page which provides more information,
documentation and some example code:

http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~kgb/pgperl.html

Karl Glazebrook
---
[email-masked]                
Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge
-- 
[email-masked]  Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, U.K.
pgperl software:   http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~kgb/pgperl.html