Question

Is there a way to have procedures (or C-like functions) in Gnuplot? I need something really simple, just something like:

function func1()
{
 var1 = "string1";
 var2 = var1."string2";

 return var2;
}

to make my gnuplot scripts a little bit more compact.

Answer 1

Gnuplot supports (simple) functions with arguments:

func1(x)=x."string2"

More complicated “inline” functions can be created if you’re using gnuplot 4.4:

func1(x)=(var1=x, var2=var1."string2", var1.var2)  #returns x.x."string2"

In this form, the last portion of the function is what is returned (var1.var2) and the statements are evaluated left to right.

If you want to have functions which accept no parameters, you can (often) use macros:

set macro
funcmacro='"string1"."string2"'
print @funcmacro