Re: class() and MATLAB compatibility

[Christian Merkwirth]

Dear all,

I would really like to see the user defined data types implemented in
Octave, but I don't know almost anything about the implementation of
Octave, so I would not dare to develop any patch on my own. However,
it would be nice to help the maintainers in implementing this:

- Remembering how the transitions to classes worked from C to C++, a
first step could be to have structures available in Octave. Couldn't
structures be implemented by twisting the code for the cell arrays,
e.g. a structure is a masked cell array of size F by 1, F being the
number of data members (fields) of the structure ? Then the field
names are converted to an index to access the field content from the
cell array.
- Later the structures get a 'label' storing the name of their class
to make out of them class objects. The most important point is now to
call m-files that are in the class directory before all other m-files
of the same name somewhere else on the path.



Regards,
Christian Merkwirth



2006/5/11, John W. Eaton <address@hidden>:
> On 11-May-2006, Paul Koufalas wrote:
>
> | G'day Paul,
> |
> | The upstream author, Christian Merkwirth, of the MATLAB package I'm
> | interested in, kindly wrote to me and is re-thinking porting his package
> | to Octave.
> |
> | He might be interested in adding the missing class() capability / Matlab
> | compatibility to Octave to do it; and he's a far better C++ programmer
> | than I am, ;-)
>
> Adding these features involves changes to core parts of Octave.  It
> won't be trivial, and it will probably require someone with a good
> knowledge of the internals (or someone willing to learn a lot about
> the way Octave works).  If you or anyone else wants to work on this
> project, it would be best to discuss the implementation on the
> maintainers mailing list and work with us to make the changes
> incrementally rather than by trying to implement it all independently
> and then dump a large invasive patch on us (that would likely be
> rejected).
>
> Thanks,
>
> jwe


--
Christian Merkwirth
Department for Information Technology ZTI
Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science
Jagiellonian University
Reymonta 4
PL 30-059 Krakow
Poland

tel: +48 12 663 5827
email: address@hidden
http://zti.if.uj.edu.pl/~merkwirth/index.html
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