PONGO has been designed to have broadly the same command interface as that offered by the MONGO6 graphics package. A number of aliases (ICL DEFSTRING definitions) have been set up for certain commands so that PONGO will do more or less what is expected for the equivalent MONGO command, but there are some substantial differences. It might well be possible to do a better job of imitating MONGO using ICL procedures; however, the aim is not to imitate the precise behaviour of MONGO, but for existing users of MONGO to be met with a package that is not totally unfamiliar to them when they begin using PONGO. Ultimately, PONGO offers substantially more than MONGO, both by its flexibility and by what it can do.
| |
Command | Behavioural differences |
| |
BOX | The optional arguments are different in the two cases. |
CONNECT |
|
DATA | |
DRAW |
|
ERASE | |
ERRORBAR | The way in which the errors are plotted is different. |
LTYPE | The actual styles produced are different. |
EXPAND | In PONGO this will also alter sizes of tick-marks. |
LWEIGHT | |
PCOLUMN | The symbol numbers in the file refer to the standard PGPLOT marker symbols. |
PEN |
|
POINTS | PONGO has additional optional arguments. |
XCOLUMN | In PONGO a symbolic name can be used optionally for the column description. |
XLINEAR | In PONGO no arguments can be given. The array is always filled in
an increasing integer sequence from one. It is possible to perform any
desired manipulation on the values in the column using the |
XLOGARITHM |
|
YCOLUMN | In PONGO a symbolic name can be used optionally for the column description. |
YLINEAR | In PONGO no arguments can be given. The array is always filled in an
increasing integer sequence from one (see the description of |
YLOGARITHM |
|
|
|
Having read the rest of this document it will have become clear that there are a substantial
number of differences between MONGO and PONGO: perhaps most significantly, it is not
possible to run a MONGO script file and expect it to work. The most important difference
at the command level is that once XCOL etc. have been set up, the data must be input
explicitly using the READF
command, where MONGO would read the data in each time that
a command that needs them is executed. Table 2 is a list of the commands that work as
expected (with the above proviso) and Table 3 gives a list of the closest equivalents to MONGO
commands.
| ||
MONGO | PONGO | Behaviour |
| ||
AXIS | BOXFRAME | Most effects achievable by can be accomplished by
altering the parameters of the |
BADY | READF | Use the |
ECOLUMN | EXCOLUMN | The errors for the X and Y directions are read separately in PONGO. |
EYCOLUMN | The errors for the X and Y directions are read separately in PONGO. |
|
GRID | BOXFRAME | A grid can be drawn by using G in |
HARDCOPY |
|
|
HISTOGRAM | PLOTHIST | Use the command |
LABEL | WTEXT | PONGO is more flexible. |
LINES | READF | Use the |
PTYPE | POINTS | PONGO is restricted to the standard PGPLOT symbols: although there are 32 of them, you cannot define your own as you can in MONGO. |
PUTLABEL | WTEXT |
|
|
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6The MONGO package was once available at all Starlink nodes, at the time of writing this is no longer the case, so this reference, indeed this whole section, is now largely historical.