Question

I have a very long code in Python so I can’t write it all here. Anyhow, the problem is that I’m plotting a function in the code with the semilogx command and everything works fine. However, if I switch to the plot command I got this error:

TypeError: ‘bool’ object is not callable

What do you think might cause the problem?

It seems that anywhere I use the plot command in the code I get the same error.
I tried plotting the first variable that I use in my code:

 f=loadtxt(folder_out+"stars/stars"+str(output)+".txt",skiprows=2)
 ids=f[:,0]
 mass_star=f[:,1] # mass in Msun
 x=f[:,2]
 y=f[:,3]
 z=f[:,4]
 age=f[:,5] # age in Myr

 plot(x,y,'.')

And the last line gives me the error. I’m sure I read the variable from the file, they have the same dimension.

Answer 1

Your error indicates that plot is not a function, as you think it is, but a bool (ie. True or False, the result of a boolean expression). This could be for a couple of reasons:

• You explicitly assign a bool to a variable named plot (perhaps in a loop — remember that loops and if statements in Python do not create a new scope)
• You have a bunch of from whatever import * statements, one of which imports a name plot which is clobbering the one from pylab (it might even be a from whatever import plot that you haven’t noticed)

You could try to narrow it down by a simple text search for plot to see if you’re doing it explicitly. You could also remove imports and strip down your script until it works as expected, and try to identify the problematic line.