Plotting API?

[Søren Hauberg]

Hi,
  Since I'm looking into documenting the plotting system I've spend 
some time learning the API (I only use a small subset of it most of the 
time). So I have some questions/comments...

1) What does 'newplot' do? Should it be documented or is an internal 
function?

2) The 'contourc' returns a matrix that contains (x,y) sequences of 
varying lengths. This must be done for the sake of matlab compatibility, 
but it is a really awful data structure. Could we add a fourth input 
argument to the function? If this was the string "cell", the output 
would instead be represented as a cell array, which really must be the 
right data structure for this.

3) This isn't API related (sorry), but could histograms drawn by 'hist' 
(or is it 'bar') be drawn with filled boxes? I find the white boxes that 
I currently get are hard to look at. (I often use 'stem' to draw 
histograms, as that is easier to look at).

4) Most of the plotting functions (except 'plot') doesn't seem to accept 
"property"/"value" style arguments such as "LineWidth", 2. This includes 
the following functions "fplot", "polar", "stem", "stairs", and "mesh". 
Should this be considered a bug, or is it intentional (perhaps a gnuplot 
limitation) ?

Thanks,
Søren