help-octave
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: save function


From: Mike Miller
Subject: Re: save function
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:29:15 -0600 (CST)

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, David Bateman wrote:

Getting rid of the "# type:" line basically then means that we go back to a monolithic and non-extensible function that can only load/save certain types of variables ("scalar" and "matrix" only).

I would think that most ascii saves are of matrix data. Wouldn't an additional option like "-ascii-noheader" satisfy those of us who would like to be able to save a matrix without header lines?

I think we should ask ourselves why someone would want to save Octave data in ascii format. I think it would mostly be for export to another program that cannot use the header lines. If it were for storage purposes to re-import to Octave, the binary format seems to be better: I created a variable x=rand(200,200) and saved it in ascii and binary formats...

   bytes   filename
  ------ ------------
  720305 x_ascii.txt
  320031 x_binary.bin

The binary file was smaller. Both save and load functions were noticably faster for binary than for ascii. ASCII therefore seems to be a poor choice for storing Octave data. On the other hand, a "save -ascii-noheader" option would be useful. I would not encourage people to use "save -ascii" when they can use "save -binary", but I am interested in other opinions on that issue.

What's wrong with having a "save -ascii-noheader" option?


If you want to introduce a matlab compatiable function as a monolithic function then a new save type "-mat-ascii" in the same vain as "-mat-binary" makes the most sense. However, I see no reason to invest myself in such an effort as there are many other ways of achieving compatiable results between matlab and octave with fprintf, etc.

That makes sense to me. Maybe a line in the 'save' documentation directing users to fprintf would solve that problem.

Mike



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]