Advice: Plotting a sequence of points

Suppose you want to produce a plot by generating points one at a time, and plotting them. In a typical programming language such as C, you would probably build up the plot one point at a time, plotting each point as it is generated. This is not the way Maple works, however. In Maple a plot is a single object, whose image on the screen or in a file is "printed" as the result of one command (although this may use the results of several different plot commands, combined with display ).

To plot a sequence of points, you build up a list or array of points and then plot it. In the case of a large list, an array can be more efficient. To take maximum advantage of the speed of hardware floating-point arithmetic, you can use an hfarray . Now the fastest way to proceed is to put this directly into a plot structure. The Maple Advisor Database procedure quickplot is a convenient way to do this. If you prefer to use one of Maple's own plotting procedures, you need to convert the hfarray to a list of lists using convert(..., listlist) . It is much faster to use pointplot in the plots package rather than plot with the style=POINT option. For a three-dimensional plot, use quickplot3d , or pointplot3d in the plots package.

Use the option symbol=POINT when plotting points to make each point be a single dot. The other possibilities are BOX , CIRCLE , CROSS and DIAMOND (which is the default).

Examples:

Here we generate a plot of 4000 successive points of the Hénon map proc ([x, y]) options operator, arrow; [1+y-1.4*x^2... . To take maximum advantage of the speed of hardware floating-point arithmetic, we write a procedure to compute the points and put them in an hfarray , evaluate it using evalhf , and plot it using quickplot . The result is very fast.

> makearray:= proc()
local L, i, x, y, xp;
L := hfarray(1 .. 4000,1 .. 2);
x:= 0.6; y := 0.2;
for i to 400 do
xp := 1+y-1.4*x^2;
y := .3*x;
x := xp;
od;
for i to 4000 do
xp := 1+y-1.4*x^2;
y := .3*x;
x := xp;
L[i,1]:= x; L[i,2]:= y;
od;
L
end:

> ti:= time():
L:= makearray():
quickplot(L,style=point,symbol=point);
time()-ti;

[Maple Plot]

                                 1.565

It takes about twice as long on my computer if we convert the hfarray to a list of lists and use pointplot to plot it.

> ti:= time():
L:= makearray():
Ll:= convert(L,listlist):
plots[pointplot](Ll,symbol=POINT);
time()-ti;

[Maple Plot]

                                 3.365

Using plot , it takes nearly 100 times as long as with quickplot .

> ti:= time():
plot(Ll,style=point,symbol=point);
time()-ti;

[Maple Plot]

                                148.373

See also:

evalhf , hfarray , convert(listlist) , plot , plot(options) , pointplot , pointplot3d , quickplot

Maple Advisor Database, R. Israel 2000