help with pan, rotate3d, and zoom functions

[John W. Eaton]

I'm working on adding the zoom function to Octave.  I see we already 
have the pan and rotate3d functions.  I'd like to make all three of 
these as compatible with Matlab as possible.

Currently, Octave's rotate3d and pan functions add a property to axes 
objects but in Matlab, pan and zoom work on figures instead of axes and 
rotate3d can apply to either figures or axes.  Matlab also appears to 
attach a handle class object to the figure properties, though it doesn't 
seem to appear in the property list of a figure handle so I assume it is 
hidden or private in some way.

Assuming Octave's classdef support is sufficient, is there any objection 
to changing Octave's implementation to use a handle class object instead 
of the current simple string property?

Is there an objection to making the pan function operate on figures 
instead of axes?  I think that's required for compatibility.

How is rotate3d supposed to work on either axes or figures?  Is the 
rotate3d object for an axis object actually just another reference to 
the rotate3d object of the parent figure?  It seems like that would be 
simple to do by storing the handle class object in the figure object 
that contains the axes object.  Is there any reason that zoom and pan 
should not allow axes arguments as well?

jwe