Differences between Maxima and Macsyma and GPL vs. commercial version

> From: Mike Thomas [miketh at brisbane]
> Sent: Thursday, 27 March 2003 11:25 AM
> 
> I tried Maxima (release version) Gnuplotting on Windows last week and after
> tweaking the script to conform with my system, failed with piping problems
> (why - I don't know - but I have positive feelings for the future - why - I
> don't know!).  The latest versions of GnuPlot are looking pretty powerful so
> I think that there may be lots of potential for this route if someone has
> the time.

Does the win32 gnuplot support pipes.  It didn't used to, The windows
versions of octave needs (or needed) the pipe-gnuplot.exe untility.

Some old octave for windows installation notes I have say:

  To make either version of gnuplot for Windows work with Octave, you
  will need a simple wrapper program so that Octave can open a pipe
  to communicate with the Windows version of gnuplot.

  * Get a copy of pipe-gnuplot.exe (or, if you want to compile it
    yourself, the corresponding source file pipe-gnuplot.c) from
    ftp://ftp.che.wisc.edu/pub/octave/BINARIES/gnu-win32.