“Graphs can be layered by using the plot! function (with an exclamation point indicating a current graph is begin modified).”
That’s actually clear to me.
But I have seen another function calls with “!”, for example in our numerical framework code. Can someone explain to me (maybe with an easy example) what the exact idea of the “!” is?
It’s a different function entirely that can do something totally different. In the case of rand(v) where v isa vector, it randomly picks an element from it.
A more conventional pair is sort! vs sort — the former sorts a vector in-place, while the latter returns a brand new vector with the same elements in sorted order. If you’re familiar with Python, it’s the difference between v.sort() and sorted(v).
The case with plot! vs plot is quite similar — the former adds an element to an existing plot, whereas the latter creates a brand new plot from scratch.
But the point is that these are all just different functions with different names. The convention about what the ! means is just that — a convention. You can sometimes look at a pair of functions like embiggen and embiggen! and have a guess at what they would each do (if you know what it means to embiggen something, that is), but the real answer is to check the docs for each one independently.
I noticed it today with plot vs plot!: I wanted to plot the datas into a chart for each loop run.
Just plot: I just got a white chart with no data set
plot!, with “!”: I got a chart with all data sets
Could the functions simply be named differently (without any “!”)?
If plot and plot! are different functions …
For example, could you have simply called plot! as “forest” (which makes no sense!)?
Yes, exactly! They’re just different functions with different names. In fact, you can even choose the names for these functions when you load Plots.jl:
julia> using Plots: plot as beginulate, plot! as blurst!!eleventy1!!
julia> beginulate(1:10, rand(10))
julia> blurst!!eleventy1!!(1:10, randn(10))
