John, At >4600 lines, axes.py is getting unwieldy, as is the
> Axes class that makes up the bulk of it. I propose to
> reorganize it and split it into at least two files.
> The main organizational change would separate the
> functionality that is directly involved in manipulating the
> axes from the more specific plotting methods. This could be
> done, for example, by putting the former in an AxesBase
> class, and then letting Axes inherit that. At the very
> least it would be nice to rearrange the methods so that all
> the pure Axes manipulation methods are together at the
> beginning.
> What do you think?
I don't want overarching ambitions to get in the way of a simple
refactor, but....
I've discussed this with Fernando and Perry on a couple of occasions,
and I think it would be useful to create high level Artists like
LinePlot, ScatterPlot, BarChart, etc, that carried the lines, etc, etc
around with them with useful configuration methods. The pylab.plot
would be a thin wrapper to Axes.plot which would instantiate a
LinePlot. A bit like what you recently did for the contour function.
High level plot objects like this would allow us to easily support
things like a FunctionPlot, which always returns the sin(x) at any
given scale, with some configurable, intelligent way to determine the
granularity of sampling at a given scale.
So that is background on the general topic of refactoring axes.py. As
for your specific suggestion, I have no problem with it. I have never
had a problem with one large file since emacs and judicious use of
search-forward and search-backward work fine for me. But I know that
code better than most, and I think your proposed changes would make it
much easier for people approaching the code for the first time to
understand what is going on. It might also make it clearer how to
pursue the grand refactor down the road. But I mention it now so you
can think about it while you are working 
JDH