Re: ... makes a difference

[John W. Eaton]

My experience tells me that it is not desirable to have a language
that is mostly compatible, but differs in a few ways, especially if
those ways make it possible to compute incorrect results with no
warning.  And, if you provide warnings, people are just annoyed.  Like
it or not, Octave is known as a "Matlab clone" (though I don't
describe it that way myself and I have never recommended calling it
that) and people have come to expect compatibility.

Yes, sometimes we have decided to implement some extensions to the
"Matlab language".  In some cases, doing that has come back to bite us
as Matlab has later added essentially the same feature but with a few
differences.  When that happens, we are faced with changing our
implementation to match (which requires changing existing Octave code)
or implementing both features (redundant functionality, added
maintenance cost).  Sometimes the latter choice may not even be
possible, for example if the features use the same syntax but have
different semantics.

jwe



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