Re: [OctDev] optimized lookup

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Feb-2008, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| I agree. My intention was to put this into Octave-Forge for anyone interested,
| so that anyone installing the Octave-Forge package gets the optimized
| version (I think .oct files have "higher priority" than .m files).
| If anyone of you Octave's maintainers decides that the function is worth
| including into Octave itself, you can simply do it (and possibly remove
| it from the Octave-Forge package).
| 
| Perhaps it would be a better idea to create a whole new package that
| would contain
| optimized (or otherwise improved) versions of Octave's library
| functions, so that they can
| be tested and eventually included.

We used to have a number of functions like that in Octave Forge and we
made it a goal to remove them.  The problem was that the replacement
functions often behaved in different ways than the functions of the
same name in Octave and that just caused confusion for unsuspecting
users.  It's possible that someone writes an improvemed version of a
function and then another person who doesn't know that the improved
version exists (he only sees the function in Octave) independenly
improves the function, perhaps even making the "improved" function in
Octave Forge no longer as good as the updated version in Octave, or
simply incompatible.  So if you want to improve on an existing Octave
function, please work with us to improve Octave by submitting bug
reports and patches for Octave rather than creating a separate package
that overrides the functions in Octave.

Thanks,

jwe