Re: Octave Compatiblity with MatLAB

[John W. Eaton]

On 14-Sep-2007, Andreas Romeyke wrote:

| 1. Octave needs a comma  as separator in cell arrays. In Matlab it is
| your choise to use comma or space only.

?

The following works for me:

  octave2.9:1> {1 2 3}
  ans =

  {
    [1,1] =  1
    [1,2] =  2
    [1,3] =  3
  }

so if you have some other specific case where there is a bug, please
report it.

| 2. Octave parses the whole file. This IMHO is a positive issue. Matlab
| evaluates only the code branch it will interpret actually.

Can you give an example of what you mean by this?

| 3. Octave could not handle all UI-commands at the moment. This includes
| set/get/gca/gcf/jet/uicontrol/uimenu/box/camlight/lighting/rotate3d and
| so on. In the testsuite I use dispatch to call wrappers for them if
| needed.

Some work is going on in this area.  Of the functions you mention, we
have at least set, get, gca, gcf, jet, and box now.  They may not yet
be fully compatible of course.  Someone has to do the work, so
contributions are helpful.

| 4. Octave does not understand nested functions, I think.

This has been discussed several times on the list.  Nested functions
may eventually be supported (after 3.0) but there are also some good
reasons to avoid this feature as it can lead to code that is extremely
hard to understand and maintain due to the scoping rules and
especially that there is no way to limit a variable's scope to be
local to a single function.

| 5. Octave does not processes classes (see @class discussion)

Again, there is work going on in this area and contributions are
helpful.

jwe