Re: goals for 3.1

[John W. Eaton]

On 20-Dec-2007, Shai Ayal wrote:

| However today the gnuplot backend does
| a lot more then drawing -- The first thing that comes to mind is
| determining tick marks,

I think tic mark locations should be computed in the database code
whenever data is added to the axes.  This is needed so that things
like

  x = -10:0.1:10; plot (x, sin(x)); get (gca, 'xtick')

can work correctly (i.e., the 'xtick' property is set correctly before
drawnow is called).  We recently made a similar change for the
{x,y,z}lim properties.  We just need to do something similar for tic
locations and labels.  Then the backend will just display these tic
marks and labels rather than compute them.

| but I'm sure that other things will pop-up.

Another thing is the legend, which is maybe more complicated than tic
marks.  For compatibility, it should be a separate axes object and
added to the list of children of the figure in which it appears.

As long as the gnuplot backend is working and more capable than the
new backend, I think we can continue to use the gnuplot backend as the
default, with the new backend available as an option.

jwe