Why does this object display function even if I haven't explicitly used plt.show function?

Question

z = plt.subplots(2,2)
z

Then the output is as follows :

>> (<matplotlib.figure.Figure at 0x28409ef3a90>,
 array([[<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x0000028409F810B8>,
         <matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x000002840A163B00>],
        [<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x000002840A1D71D0>,
         <matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x000002840A237518>]], dtype=object))

Since z[0] is an Figure object, I expected <matplotlib.figure.Figure at 0x28409ef3a90> to be the output if I run z[0] . But it displays 2x2 plot even if I haven't used display.show() explicitly! Why does such thing happen?

Answer 1

iPython outputs the repr value of the object z in the output space.
in this case, a matplotlib Figure object.

iPython does this when the last line executed is simply the object (not an assignment)