Re: Uppercase hex format?

[Andrew Janke]

On 10/10/19 8:16 PM, Mike Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 20:01:27 -0400, Nicholas Jankowski wrote:
> > seems like a fairly low risk expansion of capability. Is there any case
> > someone can think of where this would cause a conflict of some kind?  Will
> > it need to extend to any other I/o or math functions?
>
> One risk is that Matlab's format command is case insensitive. The
> command "format HEX" is identical to "format hex". Some day someone may
> ask for Octave's format command to accept case insensitive arguments for
> compatibility.
>
> I generally think that having different options that only differ in case
> is a bad interface. A better option might be something like "format
> hexupper" or "format hex upper".

Oh, yeah: I didn't notice that this was activated by a case change in 
the "format hex" argument.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the Matlab documentation for 
"format" actually lists the argument options in upper case in the first 
place, so "HEX" instead of "hex" is what they say to do if you want to 
get the normal "format hex" behavior.

Definitely "format hexupper" or "format hexu" or "format hex upper", 
instead of "format hex" vs "format HEX".

Cheers,
Andrew