- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PGPERL - A GRAPHICS EXTENSION FOR PERL. ------ - A MACRO LANGUAGE FOR PGPLOT. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ***Now available for perl5*** INTRODUCTION ------------ 'pgperl' is a version of the Perl language which has available the PGPLOT FORTRAN library, a very popular package for plotting astronomical data. (As a glance through any issue of ApJ or MNRAS will confirm.) The details of this involve some complicated C glue routines but are transparent to the user. The idea is to provide a command langage for PGPLOT and a more beautiful alternative to the various (incompatible) flavours of MONGO. Personally I have always thought that PGPLOT produced far nicer plots but at greater pain owing to the long compile/link/run cycle of F77 or C. Wouldn't it be nice if one could call PGPLOT subroutines directrly from the elegant perl language? Five days after reading `Programming Perl' I found myself at a telescope with little to do, so I hacked out the basics of `pgperl'. The rest followed during the odd spare evening in Cambridge. Unlike MONGO, perl is a real C-like language with full control structures, and is very fast and efficient. All the power of perl (and believe me that is a *lot*) is available to extract data to plot from multitudes of files in complicated free formats. Using pgperl one has all the extra functionality of SM (v.t. `SuperMongo') and IMHO the language is far more robust and elegant. Unlike the MONGOs pgperl is free and public domain - though I trust people will communicate improvements back to me to avoid version explosions. pgperl is *complete* - all the PGPLOT routines can be used and I have tested most of them. I have tried very hard to keep the pgperl calls "obvious" to anybody who knows PGPLOT and perl. See the notes below for examples of PGPLOT use from pgperl. I refer people to the excellent reference manuals available for PGPLOT and perl for complete information. The current version is 1.0 and is built with PGPLOT v5.0 commands. There are versions availalable for perl4 (which requires making a new perl executable linked with pgplot) and perl5 (as a dynamically loadble perl5 module). If you use pgperl please drop me an email and I can put you on my mailing list for updates. See the file LICENSE in the pgperl distribution for copyright/licensing information and the file pgperl.doc on how to use pgplot from perl. This is also similar documentation on the pgperl WWW Home Page at: http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~kgb/pgperl.html Many thanks to Frossie for the original inspiration, and to Larry Wall and Tim Pearson for providing the excellent ingredients I stuck together. enjoy (I hope), Karl Glazebrook, --- kgb@mail.ast.cam.ac.uk Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- OBTAINING PGPERL ---------------- pgperl can be obtained by anonymous ftp from: ftp.ast.cam.ac.uk:/pub/kgb/pgperl/ (United Kingdom home site) linux.nrao.edu:/pub/packages/pgperl/ (United States ftp mirror) Choose the perl/ or perl5/ directory according to the version you require. You then have a choice: (a) ftp the compressed tar file containing a pre-compiled version, e.g.: pgperl1.0_linux.tar.Z pgperl1.0_osf1.tar.Z pgperl1.0_sol2.tar.Z pgperl1.0_sun4.tar.Z (pgperl5_*.tar.Z for perl5) This has the advantage that you will not need to obtain and build PGPLOT as well. Install according to instructions in the file BUILDING. (b) ftp the compressed tar file containing the source only (pgperl1.0_src.tar.Z). Build according to instructions in the file BUILDING. You will have to also obtain and build pgplot and perl. See the file CHANGES for a list of recent changes in the current version. See the file BUILDING in the distribution for a building/installation guide. See the file README.perl5 for the enhancements/use of the perl5 version. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last Modified. 13/June/1995.