Plot, lines and disordered x and y

Todor Kondic <dolichenus <at> gmail.com> writes:

 > This is of course minor (actually asymptotically, no annoyance at
 > all). I am just mentioning it for 'completness' sake and because a
 > divinely ideal plotting function should cope with data given in any
 > order.
 >

It's not just a question of 'how many divine orders' there are, as 
others have pointed out.

The fact is:  if you define a vector, you have defined the order of the 
components in the vector.  if

x<-c(1,-1,2,-2,....)  then x[1] is 1 and x[2] is 2.

That is the way every software program, and every statistician, 
mathematician, and scientist agrees to define vectors.

If you want your data to be in a different order, there is no magical 
'mind-reading' tool that can order it the way you are thinking of.  You 
have to load values into your vectors (or matrices, or whatever) in the 
proper established order.

I can understand your frustration, because we've all seen datasets where 
it would be useful and/or instructive to plot a visually-obvious subset 
of the data.  It just takes a little work on each of our part to 
re-order, or sort, or extract, the points of interest into new vectors.

Carl