R help - Dec 2004 - simplest possible xyz plot

New to R, and didn't find the following in the docs.

Main use for R. to get feet wet, is to pipe in x,y,z data, one point
per line, and
plot it in 3d, like this:

{
echo 1,2,3
echo 2,4,6
...
} | R ...

But functions like contour seem to require index vectors that are
sorted.  I am curious why, and how to convert.

Also, I am curious whether any Lisp person has ever written a front
end to R that translates Lisp syntax to R.  e.g. (countour x y f) ->
contour(x,y,f).

Thanks.

t takahashi wrote:
> New to R, and didn't find the following in the docs.
> 
> Main use for R. to get feet wet, is to pipe in x,y,z data, one point
> per line, and
> plot it in 3d, like this:
> 
> {
> echo 1,2,3
> echo 2,4,6
> ...
> } | R ...
> 
> But functions like contour 
contour() needs a (equally spaced) matrix to plot contour lines.
For plotting a point cloud see, e.g., packages lattice (function 
cloud()), rgl, and scatterplot3d.


 > seem to require index vectors that are
> sorted.  I am curious why, and how to convert.
Because it makes no sense to reorder rows and columns of the matrix z.

Uwe Ligges
> Also, I am curious whether any Lisp person has ever written a front
> end to R that translates Lisp syntax to R.  e.g. (countour x y f) ->
> contour(x,y,f).
> 
> Thanks.
> 
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On Wed, 29 Dec 2004, t takahashi wrote:
> New to R, and didn't find the following in the docs.
>
> Main use for R. to get feet wet, is to pipe in x,y,z data, one point
> per line, and
> plot it in 3d, like this:
>
> {
> echo 1,2,3
> echo 2,4,6
> ...
> } | R ...
>
> But functions like contour seem to require index vectors that are
> sorted.  I am curious why, and how to convert.
>
In addition to Uwe's points, if the elevation data are in a matrix then 
these functions do not require any index vectors.

 	-thomas