Re: Octave's rand function -- discrepancy between online documentation and function

[Geraint Paul Bevan]

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Henry F. Mollet wrote:
| When I used "help rand" I got the following and I do not understand where
| your "state" is coming from.
| Henry

There is a rand function in octave-forge that replaces the standard one
in Octave. The octave-forge version accepts 'state' as an argument.

| on 9/28/04 12:04 PM, Paul Laub at address@hidden wrote:

|>Octave-Forge". Well, didn't I do  that? I must admit being confused
|>about the differences, if any, among Octave, Octave-Forge, Atlas, etc.
|>The FAQs I have found and read have not been much help in this matter.
|>I'd like to be sure I have the best program version installed for my
|>purposes and my hardware.
|>
|>Can any one clear up these questions?

Octave is the main program. It depends on a number of libraries, of
which BLAS is one. ATLAS is a modern replacement for BLAS which can be
used by Octave for improved performance (hopefully). Octave-forge is a
set of contributed functions which for whatever reason haven't made it
into the main Octave distribution and are hosted on Sourceforge.
Confused yet?

Having said that, I'm afraid that I have no idea what is causing the
error that you are getting. I can't reproduce it with Octave 2.1.60 on
Debian. The fact that 'help rand' says that 'state' is an acceptable
argument would seem to indicate that octave-forge is installed on your
machine whereas the error message would seem to indicate that it is not.

What happens if you type 'which rand' at the prompt?

- --
Geraint Bevan
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/geraint.bevan

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