[SciPy-dev] in-line graphics

[Salsifis]

Dear Scipy developpers,
Thanks for the work on scipy and the related effort to bring scientific 
computing solutions to open-source. I'm in the effort to translate my 
MATLAB scripts into scipy and the learning curve is steep.
I particularly appreciate iPython (so this is perhaps OT on the scipy 
ML) as a solution to have a researcher-friendly interface. A killer 
(and that will convince many people around me still sticking to MATLAB) 
would be to enable inline graphics, as was the case in mathematica. 
This would be :
- a very good way to interact with your code (I love to use hist() to 
know wehere my variables live),
- an easy way to create simple reports of results or to include in 
paper to allow replication of results (export session to pdf)
- an  excellent way to produce tutorials for schools (as standalone .py 
files)
Unfortunately, may coding abilities don't even permit me to gauge if 
this feature is a snap to code or if it involves calling for mysterious 
extra-human forces...
Also, I wish to stress that it's not a call for a "visual scipy" with a 
lot of avoidable features (no offense to Matlab :) ) but just a simple 
way to include in the same window a graphic ouput to a command-line 
request...

Cheerts,
Laurent

exemple (inspired by travis' tutorial) :


 >> from pylab import *
 >> plot([1,2,3,4])
  
        
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 >> plot([1,2,3,4], [1,4,9,16], 'ro')
 >> axis([0, 6, 0, 20])
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 >> savefig('secondfig.png')