[MATRIX-SIG] Re: [PLOT-SIG] Welcome

[Konrad Hinsen]

> (1) Tightly integrated with NumPy.  I would even suggest that the basic
> units of data storage be NumPy arrays.

That would be an unnecessary restriction. NumPy itself will almost
always accept nested sequence objects instead of arrays, so a plotting
library should be no less tolerant.

> (2) Easy file i/o: ascii space/comma/tab delimited with user-defined
> comment characters, netCDF, HDF, raw binary built in; easy hooks for
> user-written arbitrary file formats (this whole subject is a big sore spot
> in NumPy too!).

That's really a separate subject, and I agree on its importance. But
it's also a messy subject due to the immense number of file formats
that are in use.

For those who don't know yet, I have a netCDF interface with
tight NumPy integration, which is available from
   http://starship.skyport.net/crew/hinsen/netcdf.html
Other standard formats could (and should, in my opinion) be implemented
in a similar way.

A bigger problem is providing support functions to facilitate handling
non-standard formats.

Anyway, this is off-topic here, so I'll CC to the Matrix-SIG, which is
a more appropriate place.

> (4) Easy way to associate descriptive strings with array elements/axes;
> especially important for netCDF/HDF data.  Such strings should be by
> default automatically used as axis/legend notations.

That's really a topic on the borderline between NumPy and plotting.
What we need is an "annotated array" object. The difficult part
is to decide what happens to all the extra information during
NumPy operations.

> (9) As WYSIWYG as possible.

This will be tough, since we can't be better than the OS support we
have...

> (12) Good documentation of the GUI, the command line language, and the
> Python and C APIs.

Command line language and Python API are the same! And I doubt that
we really need a separate C API.
-- 
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Konrad Hinsen                          | E-Mail: hinsen@ibs.ibs.fr
Laboratoire de Dynamique Moleculaire   | Tel.: +33-4.76.88.99.28
Institut de Biologie Structurale       | Fax:  +33-4.76.88.54.94
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