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


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