Re: [matplotlib-devel] question about the figure class

[John H. <jdh...@ac...>]

>>>>> "Jochen" == Jochen Voss <vo...@se...> writes:

    Jochen> Hello, why is figure derived from the Artist class?  This
    Jochen> causes some special casing (figure is the only artist
    Jochen> where artist.figure does not point to the figure).

    Jochen> The the figure actually used as an Artist somewhere?  What
    Jochen> would break if it would not be derived from Artist?

In a couple of places - in the call to set_transform in
Figure._set_artist_props and when FigureCanvas calls
figure.draw(renderer).  One could write a figure class that was not
derived form Artist, but I don't really see the benefit of changing
it.  The Artist hierarchy are basically all the things that implement
draw(renderer).  Of course in a dynamically typed language one doesn't
need to derive from Artist to implement draw(renderer), but it seems
conceptually cleaner to do so in this case -- plus I have already done
the Artist hierarchy in graphviz and included it in the users guide
:-)

It might also break some code which is relying on the Artist methods,
eg fig.get_transform (for people who want to add lines, text, etc in
fig coords).  I doubt there are many such people, but it is a
possibility.

    Jochen> I tried the patch

I didn't test this - did it pass backend_driver?

JDH