Re: 'octave' and 'matio'

[John W. Eaton]

On  3-Aug-2011, David Bateman wrote:

| On 08/03/2011 09:43 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
| > Anyways, my question was, we can already read and write mat files, are
| > we doing it incorrectly or insufficiently enough to warrant throwing
| > out out code or merging it with theirs? What's to be gained by this
| > development?
| > 
| 
| 
| Matio can read/write matlab V7.3 files, which are a matlab wrapper
| around HDF5. Octave currently can't do that. So this is one major reason
| to convert to use matio.
| 
| There's also a residual bug in Octave for zipped matfile's that I can't
| seem to fix, see
| 
| http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?32167
| 
| that would probably be fixed by using matio.

Alternatively, we could maybe look at how matio solves the problem and
adapt that to Octave.

Switching to matio would not be trivial.  Currently, our code works
directly with octave_value objects.  To use matio, we would have to
translate the matio representation of Matlab values to octave_value
objects.

| However, matio can't treat matlab objects, such as anonymous functions
| and so if we convert to matio we'd have to reimplement objects.

So maybe it would be better to just extract portions of matio that do
things that we don't currently do, and adapt the code for Octave.

jwe