operation x=x(:)

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-May-1999, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:

| I am testing the ability of octave to replace MatLab in my
| company.

If you do decide to use Octave instead of (or in addition to) Matlab
at your company, please consider funding the future development of
Octave.

| One of the biggest drawbacks to use it is the missing
| ´x=x(:)´ operation.

I'm not sure why you say that it is missing.  Octave has understood
colon indexing for a long time.  In versions 2.0.12 and later, I
believe that it works in a Matlab-compatible way no matter what the
value of do_fortran_indexing.  For earlier versions, you had to set
do_fortran_indexing to 1 (or, for really ancient versions, "yes") to
enable compatible behavior.

  GNU Octave, version 2.0.14 (i686-pc-linux-gnu).
  Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 John W. Eaton.
  This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
  For details, type `warranty'.

  octave:1> x = rand (2)
  x =

    0.14962  0.13838
    0.98633  0.30464

  octave:2> x = x(:)
  x =

    0.14962
    0.98633
    0.13838
    0.30464

| Another topic - if anyone of the maintainers is listening: Taken the
| case I think octave is able to replace MatLab I would like to port a
| good part of MatLab´s signal toolbox with the help of an
| internship. I would be very happy if one of the ocatve team could
| tell me how this can be done without violating the legal rights of
| MathWorks. Of course we would follow the little pledge from
| octave´s signal toolbox help and share the results ;)

If you want an interpretation of the Matlab copyright and license, I
think it would make more sense to ask someone at the MathWorks for an
official statement on the issue.

jwe