On 06/11/2010 10:09 AM, John Hunter wrote: > On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 2:56 PM, Eric Firing<efir...@hawaii.edu> wrote: > >> Is it time for us to change our documentation, and officially support >> the use of multiple calls to show()? If we can do it, I think it would >> remove one of the main stumbling blocks for newcomers. > > I don't have a problem allowing/supporting it, but it may be tricky if > we expect it to have the same blocking/non-blocking behavior across > backends. Ie, for the script that does > > for i in range(10): > plt.plot(np.random.rand(10), 'o') > plt.show() > > many users expect that to be blocking on each call to show and the > script to continue after closing each figure. My guess is that > different backends on different platforms might show different > behavior -- some may block, others not. I haven't looked at your > changes yet, but what is your opinion on this issue?
The only change I made was to the wx backend. (The basic idea was provided in a patch submitted nearly 3 years ago.) All the other non-Mac backends already handled multiple calls to show. I agree that the difference in blocking behavior is still a problem. I think that what we should do for now, *if* multiple calls to show work on the Mac (which I can't easily test), is change the documentation to correspond to the present situation, highlighting the real problem of different blocking behavior. Longer term, the ideal would be to universally support both blocking and non-blocking behavior, since there are valid use-cases for each. It would have to be coordinated with ipython. I suspect it is easier to add a blocking option to the non-blockers than to give the blockers a non-block option. I really don't know whether we are going to be able to make major progress on this, though. Guis are a pain, and multiple gui toolkits interacting with multiple environments yield major pain and frustration. Eric > > JDH ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ThinkGeek and WIRED's GeekDad team up for the Ultimate GeekDad Father's Day Giveaway. ONE MASSIVE PRIZE to the lucky parental unit. See the prize list and enter to win: http://p.sf.net/sfu/thinkgeek-promo _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-devel mailing list Matplotlib-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel