Re: save function

[Hamish Allan]

On Mar 8, 2005, at 15:16, John W. Eaton wrote:

> I don't think we want -ascii2 to mean "do the Matlab-compatible -ascii
> thing" because it just trades one incompatibility for another.  If we
> want compatibility, then we have to make Octave's "save -ascii" do
> what Matlab's does [...]  We can still keep Octave's
> old -ascii behavior, but we will need rename the option.

On Mar 9, 2005, at 2:28, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On  8-Mar-2005, Robert A. Macy <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> | Leave alone save function
> |
> | I have not experienced any problems with it.  If I don't
> | want the header, I throw it away.
>
> I think that's a good solution, but apparently some people want
> bug-for-bug(*) compatibility.

Speaking for myself, I don't care about compatibility, I just want a 
way to save a matrix in plain text format with having to post-process 
it through a Perl script. And I don't think anyone is advocating 
compatibility with Matlab's broken behaviour, so Octave will always 
exasperate those people who really need the functionality to save 
multiple variables or complex numbers that they can no longer load ;)

No, I think Octave's save -ascii behaviour is good as it is. One final 
compromise I would suggest is that we could make it Matlab-compatible 
where possible, with ability to re-'load -ascii' being the benchmark. 
Therefore 'save -ascii var1 var1' would behave differently to 'save 
-ascii file1 var1', the former behaving like Matlab but the latter 
saving variable name information, which should be compatible with the 
usage that Robert described:

On Mar 8, 2005, at 23:32, Robert A. Macy wrote:

> As far as single variable save goes, I save lots of single
> variable files using ascii format each file named
> differently based upon some mnemonic reference to the data
> origin.  However EVERY file uses the same name for the
> variable - saves me time when I use it.

But to be honest, I'd be just as happy (if not more so, for 
consistency's sake) with e.g., 'save -dump var1' or even 'dumpvar var1'

Best wishes,
Hamish



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