change return values from contour, contourf?

So, the big question is: is it OK, or at least potentially OK, to change the pylab API for contour and contourf so that they return a single object instead of a tuple?

This breaks the matlab analogy.
I do not care about that myself,
but people coming from matlab might.
Maybe the right way to go is to provide an extended contourgroup object http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/contourgroupproperties.html
and treat contour and contourf as convenience functions that continue to work as they do.

fwiw,
Alan Isaac

Alan,

Actually, it shouldn't hurt people coming from matlab, for two reasons:
1) the present mpl contour and contourf don't return the same things that the matlab versions do, anyway;
2) Mathworks has already broken their users' matlab code by changing the contour/contourf return values between version 6 and version 7.

The contourgroup is new in version 7. What I have in mind is similar to it--although until your message, I had completely forgotten that this is the thing that broke all my matlab contouring in version 7. So, the proposed change will make mpl contour less like matlab version 6 contour and more like version 7; but this is coincidental, not deliberate.

Eric

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On Wed, 07 Sep 2005, Eric Firing apparently wrote: