Re: problem with sum (...)

[Ben Abbott]

On Nov 5, 2007, at 9:28 PM, Ben Abbott wrote:

> On Nov 5, 2007, at 10:16 AM, David Bateman wrote:.
> > I don't see why matlab should produce an error here.. Adding  
> > character
> > values should be legal, though perhaps a dumb thing to do.. Equally I
> > don't see why matlab  chose to limit this argument only to the "sum"
> > function and not also include the "cumsum", "prod", etc functions as
> > well. In any case consider the attached patch that adds this
> > functionality to "sum".. Perhaps the other data reduction operators
> > should also include this functionality?
>
> I'm also bewildered why Mathworks didn't include the 'native'  
> option for other functions ... even more confusing to me is why  
> 'native' isn't the default.
>
> I have no opinion on providing this functionality to the other  
> functions in Octave.
>
> I'm attempting to apply the patch and compile (I'm new to this) ...  
> I'll not have a chance to check on its success until morning.  
> However, your examples produced identical results under Matlab 7.3.0.

Having thought about this further ... isn't the idea of prod 
(x,'native') equivalent to all(x)?

Regarding cumsum/cumprod, each of these already have optional second  
arguments;  ex: cumsum(x, DIM).  So the addition of another optional  
argument is a bit problematic.

Ben