Re: Show and 6.0
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg89458] Re: Show and 6.0
- From: mark mcclure <mcmcclur at unca.edu>
- Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:39:58 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <g2ij15$rnk$1@smc.vnet.net>
On Jun 9, 2:36 am, AES <sieg... at stanford.edu> wrote:
> I believe I've more or less fully grasped the explanation of what Show[]
> now does in 6.0 that's been repeatedly restated in all the recent and
> earlier responses to all the repeated plaintive posts about ""Why
> doesn't my plot appear?!?" --- and this explanation actually make
> reasonable sense to me.
>
> [It's less obvious, however, how someone is suppose to know that
> Print[]; _will_ print something on screen, but Show[]; _won't_ show
> anything on screen. Read the Helps for these two commands and
> see the help pages make this obvious to you)
I personally don't think that Print is a good way display graphics,
mainly because the actual output of Print is Null. Given a graphic
produced as Output by, say Plot, you can actually grab the
graph and manipulate it. For example, if OUT is the actual output
of
Plot[x^, {x,-2,2}]
You can evaluate
PlotRange /. Options[OUT]
to get the PlotRange - even from a fresh kernel. You can't do this
with a graphic produced by Print.
Print is a convenient way to get information out of the middle of
a program, if you're debugging for example. But I never use it
to get actual output.
> <... Lot of stuff on documentation ...>
I'm surprised that I never hear anyone say anything good about
the new Documentation Center. Clearly, the lack of a good,
introductory book is a problem; hopefully, it will be cleared up
soon. I find the new documentation center to be a vast
improvement on the V5 documentation center, though. The
major advantage is that the search is "Google like". In V5,
the search facility returns dictionary matches. In V6, you
don't need to know the name of what you're searching for
to find it.
Mark