Re: goals for 3.1

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Feb-2008, David Bateman wrote:

| John W. Eaton wrote:
| >    1. Objects:
| >         -- Merge object-branch
| >         -- Implementation of superiorto/inferiorto
| >         -- Operator overloading vs. constant folding
| >   
| I suppose that now that this code is in Octave the use of dispatch
| should be discouraged, within the core of Octave at least. Though
| dispatch itself is useful so I'd hate to see it go away. The only code
| within Octave itself that uses dispatch is within the DLD-FUNCTIONS code
| sparse.cc, splu.cc, spchol.cc, spdet.cc, spfind.cc and spqr.cc. That is
| entirely the sparse code. However, for matlab compatibility the sparse
| type is of the class "double/bool" and there is no indication of its
| sparse nature within the class itself, and so the new object code can
| dispatch to a sparse type basedon its class.
| 
| Therefore, should all of the sparse dispatch code be merged with the
| corresponding functions in the same manner as spkron recently was? Or
| are we happy to leave the dispatched sparse functions as is?

I think these should be merged with the corresponding full functions
if possible, so the dispatch on various types of double objects
(real, complex, sparse) is handled inside the DEFUN itself, or by an
octave_value member function.

jwe