matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

Robert Hetland wrote:
> 
> On May 15, 2006, at 2:32 PM, Eric Firing wrote:
> 
>> there is a lengthy chunk of docstring explaining that if you expect 
>> x,y to be row,column, you are wrong!
>>
> 
> I think that most people who have used matlab, netcdf, etc. expect 
> things to be 'backwards,' like C instead 'forwards' like fortran. I 
> always use a convention like var[time, z, y, x] which seems to work 
> nicely with things like sum and mean (which operate on the first axis by 
> default for time integrals and averages), with broadcast arrays (for 
> multiplying by dx and dy, which for me are typically only functions of x 
> and y), and, of course, with pcolor!
> 
> Should this way of thinking be put into an example? Into the MPL 
> documentation? Or, just let people figure it out naturally?
Rob,
Sounds to me like something you might want to put on one of the wikis.
I have tended not to think of the x,y order in terms of storage order; I 
just naturally think of coordinates as x,y,z, and indices as i,j,k, and 
so it seems natural for x to correspond to i, etc. This is math 
notation, not computer science. I suspect this is the same thing that 
trips up other people encountering the x-is-column-number convention in 
pcolor, hence the need for documentation, and possibly a friendly option 
for specifying the intended order. I also suspect that the reason 
Matlab uses its present convention has nothing to do with storage 
order--Matlab started out in Fortran, and uses Fortran conventions--but 
rather with the way a matrix is written, with the second index 
increasing across the page from left to right.
Eric