Re: [Matplotlib-users] steps in plot()

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

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Groszkowski <pgr...@ge...> writes:
    Peter> doing this would be to incorporate it into the plot()
    Peter> command. Perhaps adding an option 'steps' (following
    Peter> gnuplot's convention could have steps equal 'histeps',
    Peter> 'fsteps' or just 'steps' - see link above.. None could mean
    Peter> regular plot() behavior).  I would say this would be the
    Peter> most elegant option, but probably would call for John (or
    Peter> someone else from the core developers) to make the
    Peter> changes. Alternatively we could use above and wrap it in a
    Peter> plot_step() function.

    Peter> Any interest in this? If so which way do we want to go?

It might be easiest to make this a line style.  Then you could use the
builtin kwarg linestyle

  plot(x, y, linestyle='steps')

It shouldn't be too hard to modify lines.py to support this.  If you
want to take a stab at it, I'd be happy to include it.  The nice thing
about making it a line style is that the changes required would all be
contained to the lines.py file which is simple and clear.  If you
change how plot processes its arguments, it's easy to foul things up.

The only potential problem I see is this would prevent you from, for
example, having a dashed stepped line, since dash is itself a line
style.  But who needs a dashed stepped line, for heaven's sake?


JDH