Re: Sparse matrices?

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Jun-1997, Ian Searle <address@hidden> wrote:

| Having just added sparse matrices to RLaB (no plug intended). I can
| offer some information. It is far more difficult and time consuming than
| it looks!

I agree that it would not be trivial, especially when it comes to
adding support for sparse matrix factorizations (in the cases where it
makes sense) or adding specializations of other existing functions for
sparse matrix arguments.

I don't have any plans to work on this myself any time soon, but maybe
it would not be too hard to add some basic support for sparse matrices
using Octave's new ability to handle user-defined types along with the
code from the sparse package from netlib (or some other freely
available source).  This may not be the best solution, but it would be
a start.

jwe