Re: Graph Plotting - Reprise

[John Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 11:22 PM 8/17/00 -0500, Timothy Wilson wrote, apparently
quoting an off-list discussion:
> On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:
>
> > > My program
> > > is for a case when y are always positive; it knows  that y=-1
> > > is the end of data mark (not to be counted as data item).

1) It is not good programming practice to use -1 (or any other "magic"
value) to signal end-of-file.  Python, like any halfway-decent computer
language, has an EOF exception and you might as well get into the habit of
using it:

     while 1:
         try:
             x = input('? ')
         except EOFError:
             break
         ...

2) What is the objective here?
 -- If the goal is to have fun writing programs and learning new languages,
    that's a reasonable thing to do, but...
 -- If the goal is to analyze and plot the data, there are much better
    ways of going about it.  For example
      http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scilab/
    is free and will give much better results with less work.