New package for drawing direction fields with gnuplot

This is a wonderful extension!
Thank you very much, Mark!
Though, I'm personally not a fan of gnuplot. 

all the best!
Valery
on Tuesday 16 of November 2010 14:56:22 Mark wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I have created a new package, drawdf, for drawing direction fields
> using Maxima and gnuplot.  Although it lacks the interactive
> convenience of plotdf, it is far more flexible and produces nicer
> looking results.  It also has better integration with wxMaxima and
> Imaxima, allowing inline plots via wxdrawdf.
> 
> For a brief demonstration of drawdf's capabilities, please see:
> 
>    http://www.netris.org/~mhw/maxima/drawdf-demo.html
> 
> Note that drawdf is built upon the draw package, and passes very long
> lists of graphic objects to draw2d.  This exposes a scalability
> problem with draw2d, namely that it requires stack space proportional
> to the number of graphic objects.  Fortunately, the fix is simple.
> Just replace the recursive definition of draw-transform in draw.lisp
> with the following iterative version:
> 
> (defun draw-transform (expr transform)
>   (reduce #'append
>           (mapcar #'(lambda (x) (draw-transform-one x transform))
>                   expr)
> 
>           :from-end t))
> 
> Drawdf is part of my recent work supporting the use of Maxima in two
> classes on differential equations at Brown University, and more
> importantly in an upcoming textbook by Vladimir Dobrushkin, due out
> next year.  However, the textbook can only describe commands which are
> included in the official Maxima release.
> 
> With that in mind, is there any chance drawdf (plus the above fix)
> could be included in the next Maxima release? :)
> 
> Comments and suggestions are of course welcome.
> 
>      Best,
>       Mark
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