Re: isa strangeness

[Richard E. Harke]

On Sunday 15 August 2010 11:50:51 pm Martin Helm wrote:
> Am Montag, 16. August 2010, 08:10:47 schrieb Jaroslav Hajek:
> > On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 4:31 AM, Martin Helm <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > The help string of isa is not really good here.
> > > Use
> > > isa(10, "double") or isa(10, 'double')
> > > class in isa is expected to be a string here which contains the class
> > > name. The reason is the syntax
> > > isa(10, double)
> > > will treat double as a function call without arguments, which is a
> > > syntax error.
> > > - mh
> >
> > On the contrary, I think that the help string is OK, It's just that
> > Richard doesn't understand the fundamentals of Octave syntax; but we
> > surely can't repeat those in every docstring, can we?
>
> I try to think like someone who  never  has used octave or matlab here (and
> I think he mentioned that in an indirect way by stating that he installed
> yesterday octave and works through the manual).
> And if I read the output of "help isa" it is not clear (for me it was , but
> probably simply because I am used to it and never think about that) that
> CLASS is a name (in fact looking at the code with "type isa" the same input
> variable is called cname in the code which is much more descriptive).
>
> - mh
Thanks for the explanation. I don't think I saw anyplace that
said the second parameter to isa was a string. I think I had
something like a C enum in mind.

Richard