Re: writing classes in octave

[David Bateman]

According to Ganesh Bikshandi <address@hidden> (on 07/23/04):
> Hi,
> 
> I have two questions:
> 
> Is there a way to write classes in Octave, 

Yes, and

> like that in Matlab (using
> @classname as a directory) ?

No.... There is no way in octave at the moment to do the overloading
necessary to create custom types from a dot-m file. There is no 
subsref, subsasgn, etc function to perform this.

However, if you are really motivated it is possible to create a class
for octave as an oct-file. There are several examples of this within the
octave-forge directories. There are complex classes for sparse, Galois
field and fixed point types in the directories main/sparse, main/comm
and main/fixed respectively. However if you want to learn how to create
your class the easiest example to look at is probably the one in
extra/linear-algebra/ov-re-tri.cc for upper/lower triangular matrices.
Note that only assignment and transpose/hermitian are defined on this
class, you'll have to check the other directories above if you want
to do something more complex.

Also note that at the moment the "[]" can not be overloaded, though there
is a patch in the works to fix that.

> Is there any study that shows the execution time (speed) of Matlab vs
> that of Octave?

There is a survey at http://www.sciviews.org/other/benchmark.htm, but
please don't take the values in this benchmark as the speed of octave
currently. There is a long thread discussing this, under different
titles earlier this year. A sum-up of the results and an updated comaprison
using the sciviews scripts can be seen in the message

http://www.octave.org/octave-lists/archive/help-octave.2004/msg00719.html

Regards
David

-- 
David Bateman                                address@hidden
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