On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 05:10:55PM +0100, Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote: > On Wednesday 11 February 2004 06:27, Thomas H. George wrote: > > > > If this question is regarded as wildly off target for this list, > > It probably is, and so, I'll not respond directly to your question, but > rather ask a new one... :-) > > > > As a physicist I wrote large programs in Pascal before retiring in > > 1994 but nothing since until last week. I thought of a problem I > > wanted to solve, read up on C++ and got my program working with only > > a few struggles with syntax > > Great! > > > but how to write directly to the printer has eluded me. > > I see. Well, I know very little about C++, but I also wrote a program > some time ago in Pascal that produced pretty graphics on HP LJ > III-series of printers. Nowadays, I think you would use a library that > provides you with an abstraction layer to the printer. I have no > experience there, but I think Qt has a print library, and it is written > in C++. > > However, are you sure that you are using the right tool for the job? > > The nice thing about the Free Software community is that most problems > are solved allready, the code is available, and it has undergone > extensive though informal peer review. > > If it is a science problem, I would strongly recommend the R system. I > used it for my thesis in astrophysics, and it is really very good. It > has a very 1-to-1 correspondance between math and code, and makes any > code you write easy to understand and it is very easy to get a good > overview. It is really a statistics system, but as far as I'm > concerned, it is good for any kind of science. It has a very strong > community consisting of some of the main authorities in numerical > statistics developing it. > > See http://www.r-project.org/ > > It is also packaged in Debian, just go apt-get install r-recommended. > > It has a large and improving graphics library that will let you make > good graphs of your data. It also has bindings to C (and through that, > C++) and FORTRAN, so you can reuse existing code within the R > framework. > > If it is not a science project, well, I find that programming at the > relatively low level of C++ is usually quite painful and seldomly > necessary. I tend to return to Perl programming whenever I need > something done. > > There is a bunch of Postscript modules on CPAN: > http://search.cpan.org/search?query=postscript > They will probably assist you greatly, should you choose a Perl path. > > > Best, > > Kjetil > -- > Kjetil Kjernsmo > Astrophysicist/IT Consultant/Skeptic/Ski-orienteer/Orienteer/Mountaineer > [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/ OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC > Thanks for pointing me at the r-project. I plan to take advantage of math capabilities as I get further into my project. I only started in C++ because my grandson is taking a high school course on C++ this spring and I wanted to be sure he could do his homework on our debian computers.
Tom George > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
