Re: conv does not preverve orientation of input

[Moritz Borgmann]

> On 28-Mar-2008, Moritz Borgmann wrote:
>
> | In Octave, the orientation of the output of y = conv(a,b) is always a
> | row vector. In Matlab, the rules are the following:
> |
> |   - if a is shorter or equal in size to b: orientation of y is the same as b
> |   - if b is shorter than a: orientation of y is same as a.
> |
> | Wuut. You may or may not believe it, but there's code that depends on
> | this behavior.
>
> Why would this be desirable?

well, writing code that makes assumptions like this is of course not 
desirable. At least I wouldn't do it. In this case, I discovered code 
written by others, with fairly wide distribution, that failed in a 
very subtle manner because it expected Matlab behavior. In fact, it 
only assumed that the output orientation was the same as the 
orientation of a long input vector "b", where "a" was a short 
coefficient vector.

In a sense, Octave's behavior is also arbitrary (or am I overlooking 
some general practice that tells us to always return row vectors?). 
Considering this and given that there's no silver bullet, I figured 
it would be the least evil to support the mode of operation that code 
may expect from Matlab.

-M