Below is the last (or nearly so) message of a thread from last summer. I have now implemented option 3 in svn, so:
If y is 2-D, plot(y) plots the columns of y against the row-index. If x is 1-D and y is 2-D, plot(x,y) plots the columns of y against x. (In this case, x can also be 2-D if it is a single column.) If x is 2-D and y is 1-D, plot(x,y) plots y against each successive column of x. (Again, y can also be a single column.) If x and y are both 2-D, plot(x,y) plots columns of y against the corresponding columns of x. They must have the same number of columns. All of this is consistent with Matlab, as far as I know. Apart from this compatibility aspect, the design tradeoff is between the appeal of plotting rows, on the grounds that they correspond to C storage order, versus the appeal of plotting columns, on the grounds that one tends to think of columns in a table as the natural vectors to be plotted. I don't think it makes much difference in efficiency; transposing is cheap in numpy. It is possible that plotting non-contiguous values triggers an additional array copy somewhere in the chain of operations. I have not tried to figure out whether it does, or what the time penalty would be if it does, but I strongly doubt it would be a noticeable fraction of the total plot generation time. The changes are only very lightly tested so far, so please look for bugs. Eric Mark Bakker wrote: > You are right, concerning your comment below. > That will work just fine, > Mark > > On 7/13/06, *Eric Firing* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote: > > > > But why is this better than the following? > > plot(Z[0,:], Z[1:,:]) > > The latter would accomplish the same, be completely consistent with > option 4, be completely explicit and unambiguous, require no more typing > than using a kwarg, require no extra logic in the plot code, and > require > no extra documentation for the plot command. > > Eric > > > > As you said, there will be many more opinions, > > > > Mark > > > > > > > > To summarize, the options seem to be: > > > > 1) Leave plot argument parsing alone. > > 2) Accept an Nx2 array in place of a pair of arguments > containing x > > and y. > > > > 3) Implement the Matlab model. > > 4) Implement the Matlab model, but taking rows instead of > columns in an > > X or Y array that is 2-D. > > > > I am open to arguments, but my preference is the Matlab > model. I don't > > think that the difference in native array storage order > matters much. > > It is more important to have the API at the plot method and > function > > level match the way people think. > > > > Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
