This library provides a simple interface for GNU/Octave use in Chicken, Gambit, and Bigloo Scheme systems. This library is meant to be used as a graph utility using the GNU/Octave interface to gnuplot. Comments and contributions are welcomed.

NEW! Version 0.6 now supports Bigloo.

NOTE This version works with GNU/Octave 2.x. Some functions are broken if you use it with GNU/Octave 3.x. Feel free to send me the patches for Octave 3 so I can add them here.

Here are some screenshots.

Download scheme code directly (version 0.6): octave.scm

tarball for Gambit and Bigloo (version 0.6): scheme-octave-0.6.tar.gz

With Chicken:

sudo chicken-setup octave

With Gambit:

tar zxvf scheme-octave-0.6.tar.gz
cd octave
make

(load "octave.scm")

To start:

 (octave:start)

To stop:

 (octave:stop)

Examples:

(octave:start)
(octave:version)
(octave:plot '(1 2 3) '(3 2 1))
(octave:title "Simple plot")
(octave:xlabel "xbar")
(octave:ylabel "ybar")
(octave:grid "on")
(octave:grid "off")
(octave:semilogx '(1 2 3) '(3 2 1))
(octave:title "SemilogX")
(octave:semilogy '(1 2 3) '(3 2 1))
(octave:title "SemilogY")
(octave:figure)
(octave:loglog '(1 1.5 211.8) '(2 2.3 21.0)  '(1 1.5 222.3) '(1.2 2.4 2222.0))
(octave:figure)
(octave:polar (iota 50) (iota 50))
(octave:title "Rose")
octave:supported-file-types ;;; to see supported file formats
(octave:save-plot-to "png" "rose.png")
(octave:figure)
(octave:title "Bar")
(octave:bar (iota 5) (iota 5))
(octave:figure)
(octave:title "Mesh 3D")
(octave:mesh (list (iota 4) (iota 4 2)))
(octave:figure)
(octave:title "ImageSC")
(octave:imagesc (list (iota 4) (iota 4 2)))
(octave:figure)
(octave:title "Mesh XYZ")
(octave:mesh-xyz (iota 3) (iota 2) (list (iota 3) (iota 3)))
(octave:save-plot-to "postscript" "foo.ps")
(octave:figure)
(octave:title "Y Error bars")
(octave:errorbar (list 1.1 2.1 3.1 4.1) (list 1.1 2.1 3.1 4.1) (list 2 3 4 3))
(octave:figure)
(octave:title "Boxes Error bars")
(octave:errorbar (list 1 2 3 4) (list 2 3 2 3) (list .1 .2 .2 .1) (list .1 .2 .2 .2) (list .2 .1 .2 .2) (list .4 .3 .2 .1) "'#~>'")
(octave:stop)

GNU/Octave and gnuplot have to be installed.

With Chicken Scheme, the posix extension is needed:

(use posix)

This simple GNU/Octave interface has some limitations:

• We suggest you don't use this module if you want to plot more than 10000 points in a graph. Points are passed in a string and the pipe is very slow when you send a lot of points. Write a wrapping function and subsample your data before plotting if you have more than 10000 points to plot.
• In some cases, like when you try to send 100000 points to a graph function, the GNU/Octave process may crash leaving a gnuplot process running. If this happens you should kill the gnuplot process manually.

• 0.6: Support for Bigloo added.
  conc and string-intersperse renamed octave:conc and octave:string-intersperse to avoid name clashes.
  octave:string-intersperse is now tail-recursive for gambit and bigloo.
• 0.5: Corrected octave:mesh and octave:mesh-xyz issues in the Chicken version.
• 0.4: Changed octave:stop.
  Added octave:stairs and octave:errorbar functions.
• 0.3: Access to all Octave's supported file types to save the current graph.
  Added octave:legend function.
  Checks for argument lengths in 2d plot functions.
  Replaced gset with __gnuplot_set__ internal Octave function.
• 0.2: Added 3d plotting functions (octave:mesh-xyz, octave:contour, octave:imagesc) and an interface version (octave:version) function.
• 0.1: Initial version.

This library is released under the BSD license.

• An interface to BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra functions) for Gambit.
• An interface to FFTW3 for Gambit.
• Vctlib, a floating point vector and matrix library for Gambit.

octave@carretechnologies.com