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


From: Paul Laub
Subject: Re: Octave's rand function -- discrepancy between online documentation and function
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 12:09:22 -0700

Dear all, 

Concerning the discrepancy over the rand function in
Octave, 

    >> which rand  yields  "rand is a built-in function". 

Moreover files like rand.m or randn.m are not on my
search path or on any of my directories. A binary grep
for "Mersenne Twister" on the octave executable brings
back the string. (That string appears in the help
listing of rand. Mersenne Twister is the name of the
pseudorandom number generator algorithm). 

> I am just wondering if your 'dispatch' function could
> somehow be broken. It might be worth having a look at
> the output of 'whos' after you start Octave. Does it
> mention the dispatch dynamically-linked function?

The whos command returns nothing when issued immediately after
starting Octave. So I am still stumped. Perhaps in
building the executable, help documentation for the new
rand (the one that accepts "state" as an arg) and
source code for the old rand (that does not accept
"state") were inadvertently used. 

Paul 

P.S. Thanks for help and clarifying (I think) the
differences between Octave and Forge. 



On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 22:41:59 +0100, Geraint Paul Bevan
<address@hidden> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Geraint Paul Bevan wrote:
> 
> |
> | 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?
> |
> 
> I am just wondering if your 'dispatch' function could somehow be broken.
> It might be worth having a look at the output of 'whos' after you start
> Octave. Does it mention the dispatch dynamically-linked function?
> 
> - --
> Geraint Bevan
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/geraint.bevan
> 
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> =AEdE
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> 



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