purpose of 10486:4e64fbbd5c58

[Jaroslav Hajek]

hi John,

maybe we should discuss this change. What's the point of this?
OK, now it's Matlab-compatible, but I think Octave's behavior was
better. I really hate it that x([a:b]) now behaves differently from
x(a:b).
IMHO this is simply a defect in Matlab that persists for compatibility
and will likely be removed in the future.

Besides breaking isindex(), this breaks the general consistency; an
invalid index is accepted in some contexts but rejected in others.
Since it is nearly impossible to distinguish a range from a matrix in
an m-function, this will be difficult to honor in user-defined
classes, breaking consistency even more.

Are there any positives that I'm missing? Otherwise, I think the
change should be reverted.

regards

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek, PhD
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz