function scope and load

[John W. Eaton]

On 17-May-2001, Adam Kornick <address@hidden> wrote:

| I'm trying to port some Matlab code that loads a file of structs and
| then returns some of the structs to the calling function.  Loading the
| file works fine from the command prompt, but when I call the function
| to load the file it returns empty variables. Examples below, not sure
| what to do next. Thoughts?
| 
| I'm using GNU Octave, version 2.1.33 (i386-redhat-linux-gnu).
| 
| 
| `The function does the following
| 
| function [const,sat,shallow]=t_getconsts;
| if exist('t_constituents.mat');
|   load -force "t_constituents.mat" %has structs inside
| else
| % do some math to generate the file
| end;

I'm not sure that this is a bug.  You are counting on the `%' symbol
on the load command line to act as a comment character.  But why
should that be (if it is treated as a comment character, it means you
can't use this syntax to load a file named "%foo").  OTOH, you can't
use this syntax to load a file named ";foo" or ",foo" either, because
";" and "," are interpreted as command separators even in this
context.

Anyway, it is easy enough to work around.  Write

  load -force file;  % my comment here.

or

  load ("-force", "file");  % my comment here.

jwe



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