I'm glad to announce the beta release of GSL Shell 2.3.
This latter brings an important new feature, a new type of tabular data with named columns that can contain strings or numeric data. I have named these kind of tables "general data tables" and it is abbreviated to "gdt".
GDT are very similar to GNU R's data frames and are very useful to store data for further analysis. Many functions are available to work on GDT tables and can be grouped in:
- statistical functions, mainly gdt.lm for linear fit
The linear fit function gdt.lm is almost exactly the same of the GNU R's function with the same name.
The plotting functions are very interesting since I've introduced a declarative language to easily create plot based on data tables. For example you can write something like;
gdt.plot(t, "thickness ~ time | tool")
to easily create a lineplot with several lines for each "tool". The fields you refer to into the _expression_ corresponds to the variable's name of the table.
The statistical functions with the plotting functions together are extremely powerful and they offer the better of Excel's pivot tables (without interactivity) and GNU R's functions in a single tool.
In addition it is also possible to create plots with stratified labels for nested factors. This is extremely useful to plot data based on multiple factors and is on the par with Excel.
All the new function about GDT table are documented in a specific chapter of the user manual:
Otherwise, please consider that this is a beta release and some things are still missing and there are still some rough edges but I hope I will be able to fill the gaps for the final 2.3 release.
Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. The new user manual is already published: