New version of gnuplot makes iterations easy --- animation as an example

Gnuplot4.6 have been released on 2012.03.08. And some new features have been added. Among them, I think block-structured if/else/while/do is the most useful one. With this new feature, one can easily deal with loop. In this post I will talk about this new feature taking animation as an example. In a previous post, how to create a gif animation using gnuplot have been talked. And it seems a little complex. An extra file is needed. Here with this new feature in gnuplot4.6, the work can be done simply as follows:

reset
set term gif animate
set output "animate.gif"
n=24 #n frames
dt=2*pi/n
set xrange [0:4*pi]
set yrange [-1:1]
do for [i=0:n]{
  plot sin(x+i*dt)/(1. + i/12.) w l lw 1.5 title sprintf("t=%i",i)
}
set output

Animation using new fearute of gnuplot4.6