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From: | kamaraju kusumanchi |
Subject: | Re: ... makes a difference |
Date: | Fri, 10 Mar 2006 16:27:17 -0500 |
User-agent: | Debian Thunderbird 1.0.7 (X11/20051017) |
John W. Eaton wrote:
This must have already been discussed before. But I am relatively a newcomer to octave world.My experience tells me that it is not desirable to have a language that is mostly compatible, but differs in a few ways, especially if those ways make it possible to compute incorrect results with no warning. And, if you provide warnings, people are just annoyed. Like it or not, Octave is known as a "Matlab clone" (though I don't describe it that way myself and I have never recommended calling it that) and people have come to expect compatibility. Yes, sometimes we have decided to implement some extensions to the "Matlab language". In some cases, doing that has come back to bite us as Matlab has later added essentially the same feature but with a few differences. When that happens, we are faced with changing our implementation to match (which requires changing existing Octave code) or implementing both features (redundant functionality, added maintenance cost). Sometimes the latter choice may not even be possible, for example if the features use the same syntax but have different semantics. jwe
How about adding an option to octave say -matlab-compat? When octave is run with -matlab-compat option, it behaves exactly like matlab (nothing more, nothing less) would behave. When the -matlab-compat option is not specified, octave can do whatever octave thinks is the right way of doing things.
What do the gurus think about this idea? Too much overhead to the code? -- Kamaraju S Kusumanchi http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/kk288/ http://malayamaarutham.blogspot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------
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