Symbolic routine sym

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Mar-2009, Donald MacKinnon wrote:

| I'm having a problem with a the symbolic routine sym(). x=sym('x') works 
| fine.
| 
| An application I've found uses the routine sym('','real'). It is not 
| clear if they're using Octave or Matlab.
| 
| Octave expects a single argument and fails with:
| "single error: one argument expected"
| 
| Using a single agreement then causes a routine at a lower level to fail 
| with:
| 
| "error: can't perform indexed assignment for ex type
| error: assignment failed, or no method for `ex = ex'"
| 
| It could be that the function sym() in Matlab say was compiled as an 
| overloaded function. (a guess)
| 
| If anyone knows of a work around I'd be pleased to try it out.
| I'm running Mandriva 2009.0 with all updates executed.

The symbolic package is external package, not part of the core Octave
distribution.  My suggestion is to report the problem to the
maintainers of the symbolic package, or contribute the changes for the
functionality you need.

jwe