Re: Support for N-dimensional arrays almost done

[Joel Dahne]

Hi Oliver,

Oliver Heimlich writes:

> thank you very much for your great work so far.  It's hard for me to
> keep pace with reviewing and merging your changes.  Fortunately, this
> doesn't spoil your progress.  ;-)

I have full understanding for that it takes some time for you to review
and merge them. I have no problem continuing with the rest of my work so
you don't have to feel rushed. Just let me know when you encounter
some problem or some thing odd and I will try to fix it!

> Some small hints on your latest changes:
>
> The last two examples in [2] should be reformatted in texinfo style: The
> input lines need no prompt (>), and the result lines should be marked
> with @result{}.
>
> You disabled a doctest [3] in the manual.  It used to work in doctest
> 0.4.1, but no longer works in doctest 0.5.0.  The cause is: texinfo
> examples without any output no longer get executed by default.  So,
> doctest skips the first example block.  Consequently, the second block
> fails.  It can be fixed with the following directive:
>
> @c doctest: -TEXINFO_SKIP_BLOCKS_WO_OUTPUT

I have fixed both of them! There is one more test that always fails for
me

doc/chapter/examples.texinfo ........................... FAIL    1/15

   >> f = @(x) sqrt (x) + (x + 1) .* cos (x);
    pkg load symbolic
    df = function_handle (diff (formula (f (sym ("x")))))

      expected:    df = @(x) -(x + 1) .* sin (x) + cos (x) + 1 ./ (2 .* sqrt 
(x))

      got     : df =

@(x) -(x + 1) .* sin (x) + cos (x) + 1 ./ (2 * sqrt (x))

It seems like that there is only a problem with the formatting but I
have not been able to fix it. Does it fail for you to, and if so should
I add a SKIP for it?
>
>
> Regarding the unit tests: I'll put a little bit more work into the
> Makefile and add complete support for the new ITF1788 test data during
> all make targets, e. g., “make run”.  The aim is that we can eventually
> get rid of the generated test/*.tst files (or
> build/octave/native/interval/*.tst files in the package development
> workspace).  For the user it makes package testing more straight forward
> since you can simply test the function that you want to test and don't
> have to execute an extra test suite.  If you want, you can spread use of
> itl.mat among the other methods and add ND array test by reshaping the
> test data.

I'm not sure I follow you here. You want to get rid of the test/*.tst
files, where should the test be stored then? Is the goal to be able to
use Octaves test-command to perform all tests (thus making it easy to
test only one function)? ITF1788 will supply the testing data, where
will we reshape the data, in ITF1788 or in the interval packages Makefile?

> Regarding bonus topics that you could follow after having finished the
> work on ND arrays:
>
>  - Improve plotting [4] by adding support for more functions (plotyy,
> semilogx/y, loglog, and others that make sense) or by adding support for
> plotting options (line style, marker style, …).
>
>  - Implement new interval arithmetic functions (some rough ideas in the
> wiki [5]).
>
>  - Also I like your idea to work on Taylor arithmetic, since it is
> closely related.

I have started to work on a package to Taylor arithmetic. At the moment
I'm using the same repository as during the spring [1]. Most likely I
will later have some question regarding how to handle a new package in
Octave but at the moment I'm just trying to get it to work.

[1]
https://github.com/Urathai/octave-taylor-POC