Re: How does Octave shine?

[Steve C. Thompson]

On 20 Sep 06 20:56PM, Quentin Spencer wrote:
> Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso wrote:
> > On 20/09/06, Cameron Laird <address@hidden> wrote:
> >   
> > >  What shows Octave off to best advantage for a
> > >  Matlab-using audience?
> >
> > I can think of a couple of enhancements I
> > particularly enjoy:
> >
> > 1) "Better" syntax. By this I generally mean that I
> > find Octave just slightly more readable in that
> > allows for some mostly cosmetic enhancements like
> > endfunction, endfor, or endif instead of just a
> > plain end.
> >   
> I forgot about syntax differences. My favorite syntax
> enhancements are the C-style ++ += *= and /=
> operators. Another one is the ability to index the
> output of an expression. Suppose you wanted to find
> the median value of 101 random variables (ignoring
> that octave has a median function). In octave, you
> can do this:
> 
> y = sort(rand(1,101))(51);
> 
> In Matlab, this is a syntax error and requires two
> steps:
> 
> x=sort(rand(1,101));
> y = x(51);

Yeah, Octave has a more advanced parser than Matlab.
Some of these details are detailed here:
http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?MatlabOctaveCompatibility

I like how in Octave, I can issue

  rand (1,
        2)

or

  rand (1, \
        2)

or 

  rand (1, ...
        2)

while Matlab only supports the last example.  This is
but one example of the seemingly thoughtless
idiosyncrasies found in Matlab that Octave has
overcome.

Steve