What is the difference between gnuplot and AquaTerm?

Question

What is the difference between AquaTerm and gnuplot.

Also is it true that Octave uses AquaTerm instead of X11?

I know AquaTerm might be more rendering of the actual graphic and gnuplot is probably the engine but what does that means?

Answer 1

AquaTerm is a graphics renderer. Basically, it is a library with an API with allows various programming languages to display graphics on the screen. gnuplot is a plotting utility. In a lot of ways, gnuplot functions like a special purpose programming language used for creating plots. It is able to write those plots to a whole bunch of different devices ("terminals"). examples of some devices are files (png, pdf, postscript) printers and graphics libraries (X11, AquaTerm). Ultimately, any graph that you can make with gnuplot + AquaTerm for the display on the backend could be made without gnuplot. Gnuplot's purpose is to abstract the details of the output device away from the user as much as possible so that if you make a plot and display it using AquaTerm, you can then easily save that plot to a png file for future reference. In reality, there are always some terminal dependent behaviours, but most of the time it doesn't actually matter.