Re: More MATLAB Silliness

[Michael Creel]

On Tuesday 05 October 2004 22:33, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 29-Sep-2004, Quentin Spencer <address@hidden> wrote:
> | For anyone tracking weird things that MATLAB lets you do that somebody
> |
> | might ask for in octave someday, how about this:
> |  >> a=ones(2,1);
> |  >> b(1,:)=ones(2,1);
> |  >> whos
> |
> |   Name      Size                    Bytes  Class
> |
> |   a         2x1                        16  double array
> |   b         1x2                        16  double array
> |
> | I'm always unintentionally doing things like this in my code (assign a
> | column vector to a row of a matrix), and in the past both Octave and
> | MATLAB would give you an error, and I would fix it. Release 14 appears
> | to have changed this to automatically detect what you meant to do and
> | take care of it for you. A nice thought, I suppose, but I wonder what
> | unintended consequences this could cause for an unsuspecting user. Are
> | there any reasons other than convenience why this behavior is good? Any
> | guesses on how many releases until they remove this feature?
>
> I suspect that this behavior is allowed because the orientation of
> vectors is considered unimportant.
>
> Should we copy this behavior?
>
> The problem I see is that you can be tripped up if you are writing
> code that is expected to work with matrices but only test your code
> with matrices that have one row or column.  Then it can appear that
> your code is OK during testing and fail later when someone tries to
> run the code with matrices that have rows and columns both greater
> than 1.
>
> jwe

IMHO, stuff like this, if used, makes for hard to understand and maintain 
code. Another question is what this could be good for? But on the other hand, 
I can appreciate the attractiveness of compatibility when it's possible. Does 
Octave want to attract all Matlab users, or just the ones that program in an 
intelligible way?
Michael