Re: stubs for missing functions

[Søren Hauberg]

tir, 23 03 2010 kl. 18:33 -0400, skrev John W. Eaton:
> We frequently see people sending bug reports or questions on the help
> list about functions that are available in Matlab but missing from
> Octave.
[snip]
> Comments?

I think this idea is good. Just a few minor comments/questions:

     1. We recently introduced warnings when a function in a package
        shadows something that is distributed with Octave. If we start
        distributing a bunch of stubs, won't that generate a bunch of
        warnings if the user installs a package that provides some of
        these functions?
     2. It would be nice if http://www.octave.org/missing.html included
        the list of stubs. When suggesting the user to look at
        Octave-Forge we can then use the following link:
        http://octave.sourceforge.net/find_function.php?fun=STUB_FUNCTION where 
'STUB_FUNCTION' should be replaced with the name of the stub in question.
     3. It seems like you forgot to deal with keywords in your list of
        potential stubs. At least the list includes stuff like 'end',
        'for', 'varargin', etc. In Octave, you can get the complete list
        of keywords, using the '__keywords__' function.

Also

> +function unimplemented (fcn)
> +
> +  txt = __makeinfo__ (sprintf ("The %s function is not yet implemented in 
> Octave.  Please read @url{http://www.octave.org/missing.html} to find out how 
> you can help to contribute a working version of this function.", fcn));
> +
> +  while (txt(end) == "\n")
> +    txt(end) = "";
> +  endwhile

Can't this while-loop be replaced by a call to a 'strip' function. Ohh,
I see we don't have functions for stripping spaces from text. In 'pkg.m'
we have some functions for doing stuff like this. Perhaps they should be
made generally available?

Soren