Re: handle graphics

[John W. Eaton]

On 13-Jul-2005, Jonathan Stickel wrote:

| I also don't see a tremendous need to replicate handle graphics
| either.  I think the most important thing is to have a usable, and
| beautiful, graphics and visualization system available sooner rather
| than later.

You are focusing too much on the rendering part of things here.  The
point is that I am now finding code written for Matlab that would be
able to run "out of the box" in Octave if only the handle graphics
functions were implemented in some way.  The implementation does not
have to be perfect or even complete.  But the core functions should be
present so that more freely available code that was originally written
for Matlab can also run within Octave, without having to first remove
all the graphics functionality (which is often not an easy thing to
do, because there is a lot of code out there that mixes computation
and graphics in ways that are not easy to seperate).

| It could take years, if ever, to replicate Matlab's
| advanced 3D surface and volume functionality starting from scratch.

I don't think that anyone is suggesting that we implement the
rendering parts from scratch.  We could use the Python matplotlib,
Vtk, or whatever someone else wants to write, in whatever combination
of those things is appropriate for the actual displaly of the graphics
information at hand.  But to hook these things up to Octave in a
Matlab compatible way, we have to implement the interface for Octave
to manage the graphics objects and properties.  I think that part can
and should be independent from the rendering code, and that it should
only have to be implemented once.

jwe