Why do we have to deprecate and remove functions?

[Andreas Weber]

Dear all,

what is the reason to deprecate functions? Is it just to be as MATLAB 
compatible as possible or to keep the codebase as small as possible?

I ask because I have to maintain code which has to run on Octave >= 
3.8.2 up to current versions which is often hard because functions were 
removed which have worked without problems for years.

One example for a deprecated function is "strmatch". Currently I use it 
this way:

strmatch ("foo", {"abcd", "foobar", "foox"})
ans =

   2   3

After 5.1.0 I think I have to use:

find (strncmp ("foo", {"abcd", "foobar", "foox"}, numel("foo")))
ans =

   2   3

-- Andy