“At its core, Gnuplot is an engine for streaming in data,
massaging it, and producing visual output. The input portion of the
process can be interactive, read from a file, or generated by
another program ? that is why Gnuplot is often used as the graphing
engine for other data-centric applications. Examples include the
GRASS geographic information system and the Octave numerical
computation framework, as well as third-party tools like Pig, the
data-analysis platform for Apache Hadoop, or the Puppet
configuration-management tool.