Heh, you edited significantly again while I was replying. It's tough to keep the conversation coherent when you do that.
Thank you for the link. I'll give it a look.
> While you're farting bubbles in the bathtub about integrating "bc" into bash, and haven't even proposed how you'll integrate the canvas api yet.
I tend to fart in the shower, and I don't give a crap about bc or bash. As for the canvas api, you must've missed the part where I said you can call gnuplot from bash (or any language which supports fork, dup, and exec, or popen). I'd guess that bash calling gnuplot as a subprocess is on par with Python calling the Tkinter canvas through their hackish hidden-Tcl abomination. You're probably a matplotlib guy though...
Incidentally, I have built command line plotters before, but I can't share the code, so you don't have any reason to believe me on that.
Nope, Python's Tkinter canvas calls into TCL/Tk directly. It doesn't run it as a separate process. There is no comparison: Another false equivalence.
(No I'm not a matplot guy, but I've built command line plotters too and even terminal emulators that accepted escape codes with PostScript commands. ;) And I've done a lot of work with TCL/Tk and canvas both directly and through Tkinter, and also with PyGTK using pycairo, and I've integrated lots of code into Python with SWIG, including Python C extension integrated with PyCairo. Can you integrate C extensions into bash with SWIG, or any other way short or recompiling?)
Here are some open source reasons to believe me:
(search for "termulate-ps-string"):
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/term.ps.txt
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...
You keep going back to this mistaken belief that forking off separate processes is incredibly cheap. Or even convenient. You really should rid yourself of that misconception.
Sure, there is some cost to all the glue code required by something like TCL or SWIG or COM or P/Invoke or any foreign function interface. But that's not even in the ballpark of how long it takes to fork off a Unix process.
It's ironic that the strongest argument bash apologists have is that it's convenient, but once you are faced with all that mish-mashed haphazard syntax and kludgy tricks (like testing for an empty string like "x$foo" == "x"), it's actually one of the most inconvenient languages there is!
Yes[1], although I don't recommend doing that. See my longer comment[2] re: bash is a simple scripting/glue language, not a general-purpose programming tool.