OCaml tutorial

Intro

The OCaml bindings for PLplot provide three means of accessing PLplot's functionality through three modules, Plplot, Plplot.Plot and Plplot.Quick_plot. In versions 5.9.6 and later the OCaml sections of the PLplot documentation includes a tutorial which introduces each of these modules. This tutorial is meant to expand on that material and allow for a simpler process for contributing improvements.

Using the Quick_plot module

The main OCaml PLplot module is meant to be open'd:

 open Plplot

From here, one can try out a quick plot of sin and cos:

 Quick_plot.func [sin; cos] (-3.14, 3.14)

which gives output which looks something like this:

That's great, but it would be even better if there were labels so that we know what the axes mean and a legend to show which line corresponds with which function. We can do that:

 Quick_plot.func
   ~labels:("Angle (radians)", "f(x)", "A few functions")
   ~names:["sin"; "cos"]
   [sin; cos] (-3.15, 3.15)

with output which looks something like this:

Much better, and much easier to interpret!