interactivity with the glory shell

[Daniel Heiserer]

Hi,
a few months ago, when I started working with octave rather than matlab
I asked for a shell escape sequenz "!". The answer was that octave has a
"system" command and the "!" is the negation operator. 

Unfortunately i have hundres of #.m files using the "!" as a shell
escape.
And I think others have too. The other thing is that I have to work with
BOTH systems: matlab AND octave.


My suggestion would be:

1) As I cannot imagine, hwy anybody should use the "!" as the 1st
character in a string to be evalutaed, either on the commandline/script
nor with the eval("!foo") octave could use it as the shell escape and
get more matlab compability. If the "!" is not the 1st character use it
as the negation character.

2) It would be nice to get the answer of the shell using the ``
(backquotes). This is much shorter than the system command.

I know that the system command of octave has the power to do all that
stuff. But why not adding a few more nice features, even if the provide
much more matlab-script functionlaity.




Bye                     daniel