merging functions from octave-forge

[John W. Eaton]

For Octave 3.0 (or perhaps a later 3.x release) I'd like to aim for
including most of the functions that are currently in Octave forge for
compatibility with core Matlab functionality (i.e., those in the list
http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/refbookl.html).

Some conditions for including a function in Octave are

  * Copyright status must be clear and distribution terms must be
    compatible with the GPL.  We must not have any code that is
    (inadvertantly or not) derived from some proprietary source.

  * Coding style should follow Octave's coding style.

  * Docstrings must be formatted with Texinfo markup so they can be
    included in the printed manual.

I did a quick count, and found that the list of functions in Matlab is
approximately 1066.  Octave includes 390 of those, and Octave forge
contains 172 of them.  We have the following overlap between Octave
and Octave forge

  cellstr char chol deal detrend double fieldnames gammaln grid hankel
  isa isfield isunix lin2mu mu2lin ndims polyder rand randn rmfield
  struct toeplitz tril triu unix

so that leaves about 150 functions to merge:

  addpath betaln blkdiag brighten builtin calendar clf complex
  contourf conv2 convhull convhulln cplxpair csvread csvwrite cumtrapz
  datenum datestr datevec del2 delaunay delaunay3 delaunayn demo
  dlmread dlmwrite dos drawnow edit ellipj ellipke eomday expm1 factor
  factorial fill fill3 filter2 fminbnd fplot full funm fzero getfield
  ginput gradient griddata gtext hadamard ifftshift imread imwrite
  inputname interp1 interp2 interpft intersect isdir isequal ismember
  isprime issparse legend legendre magic mat2str meshc mkpp nchoosek
  nnz nonzeros now nthroot ode23 ode45 optimset orient pareto pascal
  patch pcg pchip pcolor peaks peaks perms pie plot3 polyarea ppval
  primes print psi quadl quiver rat rats regexp rmpath rosser rref
  scatter setdiff setfield setxor sortrows sound soundsc sparse
  spdiags speye spfun spline spones sprand sprandn spy stem str2double
  strcmpi strfind strmatch strncmp strncmpi strtok strvcat surf surfc
  tar text textread trapz tsearch unique unmkpp view voronoi voronoin
  waitbar wavread wavwrite weekday wilkinson xlsread xmlread xmlwrite
  zoom

Comments?

jwe