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Basu

Wed Jul 23, 2008 4:23 am


A language for describing graphs

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I've been doing some research involving Lindenmayer systems and in the process have come to looking at graphs. Unfortunately I know only a small amount of graphs as part of my 2nd CS course at college. I have a basic of what they are and some algorithms (Prim, Djikstra). I've been building a small library for graphs in Python, both because Python doesn't have native graphs and also because I want to learn more about graphs. I know that there are some 'standard' implementations of graphs (matrices, lists etc) but I was wondering if there is some standard implementation-independent language for describing graphs and graph algorithms (in the way that lambda calculus is a language for describing computation via functions). I know this isn't a particularly clear request, partially because I'm not very sure about what I'm looking for myself, so any contributions would be welcome.


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rdrake

Wed Jul 23, 2008 10:04 am


Re: A language for describing graphs

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AT&T created [url=http://www.graphviz.org/]Graphviz.  Basically you write a simple text file in the Dot language and it processes it to create a pretty graph.  Check out the examples, you can do some pretty complicated things.

Oh, and Graphviz has bindings for numerous languages so you can generate graphs in Python even :-).


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apomb

Wed Jul 23, 2008 10:07 am


RE:A language for describing graphs

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If you want something like that as well, check out[url=http://www.cacti.net/index.php]cacti. it uses RRD tool to graph any sort of data you can think of.
It also has bindings for many languages, i mostly use perl scripts to populate the databases, but you could use python, ruby, hell, you could even use turing if you really wanted. ;)


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btiffin

Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:40 am


RE:A language for describing graphs

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Check out R.  http://cran.r-project.org/ 

If you do; after installing and starting up R, try
> demo(graphics)

If you want to go all "mainstream" check out GNUPlot.  http://www.gnuplot.info/

And after that, check out Ch.  The free student edition offers a stats and plotting layer.
http://www.softintegration.com/

But check out R, it's manly;  GNUPlot is for weenies that can't handle real statistics.  (Kidding. GNUPlot is pretty cool too).
Python has a GNUPlot interface.  http://gnuplot-py.sourceforge.net/

Cheers
Edits; Added the gnuplot.py link.