test functions

[Paul Kienzle]

Hello,

I'm resurrecting the tests I wrote several years ago
for SignalPAK (finally!).  Presently a lot of them
are failing, but I can fix those.

My question is, is there any way to display a value
such that I can cut and paste that value back into
octave and have it create a value of the correct
type?

Python distinguishes between repr() for machine
readable and str() for human readable.  I wan't
something like that.

This would also be useful for example for saving arbitrary types to an
ascii file --- for example, if sparse is saved as

  sparse([i1 i2 i3 ...],[j1 j2 j3 ...],[v1 v2 v3 ...],m,n)

then the octave interpreter doesn't need to know
anything about the sparse command when loading the file
it just need to be able to execute the next statement.

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden