Launching Tkinter or wxWindows frames from interpreter

[bptonner at yahoo.com]

I want to launch frames to plot graphs from the Idle interpreter prompt.
The example plotting utilties from wxPython/wxWindows (wxPlotCanvas),
and from Scientific Python (TkPlotCanvas)are good starting points (and
they both work fine).

The problem is that once the windowing "app" is put into the event loop,
the interpreter hangs up. In other words, after calling app.MainLoop()
(wxWindows) or window.mainloop() (TkPlotCanvas)you can't continue in the
interpreter until closing the frame or window.

I can work around this by breaking the rules, and putting up frames
without event loops (not calling app.MainLoop or window.mainloop).
Everything works, except that then the frames cannot be closed. The
OnCloseWindow event is still called, but it is apparently queued,
waiting to be 'caught' by an event loop that has not been enabled.

I need to be able to call a function that will pop open the Tkinter or
wxWindow frame, but continue to allow input at the interpreter command
line. What's the proper way to do this?

-Brian