problem with <type 'array'> in pcolor

How are you handling this transition time? I assume Numeric is

    >> being imported rather than numarray or is something going on in
    >> disutils that checks first for numarray and then defaults to
    >> numeric if not present?
     
    > Numeric is loaded by default unless you set one of the ways
    > of making numarray the default (it's described on the
    > matplotlib web site (see
    > http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/faq.html#NUMARRAY thought
    > the link to the numerix page doesn't work for me at the
    > moment)

I updated the link - thanks for letting me know. The correct link is
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/matplotlib.numerix.html.
                                   
    >> If not, do you agree that the code should change so that it
    >> works in either case?
     
    > I'll leave it to John to decide on that, but it would seem
    > so (though I don't know how many similar cases there are in
    > the code like this; it may suggest a utility function to
    > coerce rank-0 arrays to scalars or some such thing).

I think having code that works if both cases would be a good thing,
but the caveat, as Todd mentioned, is that x[i][j] is slower than
x[i,j], and pcolor is already damn pokey. Fortunately, the point is
effectively moot. The changes I'm making now for fast drawing of
large numbers of patch objects will change the pcolor code
substantially. When I make those changes, it is unlikely that I will
loop over every i,j element separately, since this is painfully slow.

Rod, If you'd like, I can email you a beta testing version of the next
release and you can see if it passes your test cases. If not, I'll
try and correct the problems.

JDH