Re: private directories

[John W. Eaton]

On  2-Mar-2012, Ben Abbott wrote:

| On Mar 1, 2012, at 10:43 PM, Muhali <address@hidden> wrote:
| 
| > I noticed that private directories are treated differently in matlab and
| > octave. If in a function a file from the private directory is loaded this is
| > recognized by matlab but not by octave, as in the following example where
| > foo.mat resides in /foo/private:
| > 
| > -------------------
| > % /foo/fun.m
| > function y = fun()
| >   load foo.mat
| > end
| > -------------------
| > 
| > %> cd /foo; octave --no-init-file -q
| > octave:> fun
| > error: load: unable to find file foo.mat
| > error: called from:
| > error:   /foo/fun.m at line 3, column 4
| > 
| > Should this be considered a bug or a missing feature?
| > 
| > M.
| 
| This is a bug.

I've never liked that data files could also be found by searching a
list of directories and I find the idea of also searching private
directories quite strange.

But whatever, we did modify Octave to work in a compatible way (but
with a warning) for normal path directories.  So I suppose the lookup
rules  for private directories could be changed to search for data
files in the same way they are searched for functions.

Would someone like to work on that and submit a changeset?

jwe