Scientific Plotting?

[William Park]

On Mon, Jul 19, 1999 at 04:04:39PM -0500, Nick Bower wrote:
> People at my current work use MatLab or IDL for chomping data through
> data calculations and plotting the results in an environment that lets
> you get GUI's up and going very quickly (among other things).  It's been
> a goal of mine that one day I could show them that this could be done
> with as little effort (with greater room for expansion) using Python.  
> Plus I'd like to put a strong case forward to our physics department for
> our up-and-coming new scientific programmers to learn something with a
> broader scope like Python than the now used IDL and recently abandoned
> Fortran-77.
> 
> But...What do people use for plotting?  After looking at the Python
> Topic Guides, I've taken a quick look at the BLT and DISLIN pages, but
> both of these amazingly lack any screen shots to demonstrate their
> capabilities!!!

Hi Nick,

I use PiCTeX for plotting.  It's more to do with my habit, not at all
related to actual need or performance :).

> 
> And lastly, can array operations (using NumPy) be done without for loops
> as in IDL/MatLab?  eg Multiplying 2 arrays is easy in these two packages
> because you don't need array subscripting and iteration.

Well, YES.  That's what 'class object' is all about.  You can define
"matrix" class, and then do something like
    A = matrix(...)
    B = matrix(...)
    C = A * B

William

> 
> Thanks muchly, Nick.
> 
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