Is there a way to detach matplotlib plots so that the computation can continue?

Question

After these instructions in the Python interpreter one gets a window with a plot:

from matplotlib.pyplot 

import * plot([1,2,3]) 

show() 

# other code

Unfortunately, I don't know how to continue to interactively explore the figure created by show() while the program does further calculations.

Is it possible at all? Sometimes calculations are long and it would help if they would proceed during the examination of intermediate results.

Answer 1

Yes, they're many ways to detach matplotlib plots so that the computation can continue you can do it by using  matplotlib's calls that won't block:

from matplotlib.pyplot 

import plot, draw, show 

plot([1,2,3]) 

draw() 

print 'continue computation'