On 4/6/07, Eric Firing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The size argument, s, is given in squared points; that is, it is a > measure of area, not of linear dimensions. > > This strikes me as counterintuitive and not particularly useful. It > seems more natural that the size be a linear dimension; if a user wants > size to vary with area, the user can pass in the square root of the area. > > Would anyone object to this change? How strenuously? I am not actually
This strikes me as a foolish consistency that may be best to live with. The basic scatter signature is the same as matlab's, which also uses size in points squared. It has never been intuitive to me either, but I simply slavishly followed their convention. By now we have three constituencies who may find a change irksome: current users who have written code around the long-standing implementation, prospective users coming from matlab who will find it confusing that the signature is otherwise the same as matlab's but the size argument is different, and developers who have to update the code, the examples, the website screenshots, and the user's guide. Since this irksome, somewhat counter-intuitive feature is well documented, it seems preferable to me to let people simply square their sizes for scatter and not break anyone's code. It's not too hard to do r = 10*rand(20) # radii scatter(x, y, 2*pi*r**2) Maybe we should simply add an example like the one above to the docstring. Now there are those who are dusting off their pens as I type, getting ready to point out that we should not slavishly follow matlab but rather do the best thing possible. Fair enough. But we should also be hesitant to break the API and existing code to fix a minor annoyance that is easy to work around. I think one thing that has contributed to the success of matplotlib is that the API has been extremely stable. Code written against mpl 0.1 for the most part still runs, though maybe an import statement needs to be changed (replace matplotlib.matlab with matplotlib.pylab). The major reason for this is that we emulated matlab's API from the start. In many cases we've extended the matlab functionality significantly, particularly with all of the stuff we do with keyword args, but we have rarely if ever removed matlab compatibility once it was in place. Hence people who wrote their code against the original matlab-like API can still use their code now. JDH ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
