Re: NaN-toolbox much faster now

[John W. Eaton]

On 17-Mar-2009, Alois Schlögl wrote:

| I guess this comes from the old days (around Octave 2.0 and 2.1) when
| there were really much to many global flags used much too often.
| 
| However, a general ban on on the use of global flags is going to far, IMHO.
| 
| OTOH, if global variables within functions are really "harmful", it
| would be only consequent to enforce this rule by preventing the
| use of global variables within functions. ;-)

Global variables are not always bad.

Even some global option variables are OK.  For example, those that
simply change an output format or the appearance of a prompt don't
cause much trouble because almost no code depends on those settings,
and they are highly unlikely to cause a computation to produce
incorrect results.

But settings that affect the way code is parsed, or that cause a
function to produce different results for the same input are harmful.
I don't want to see any more of those introduced in Octave.

I also don't want Octave to differ from Matlab when computing mean,
std, etc., because I think doing so will generate bug reports.

jwe