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Re: ... makes a difference


From: Gorazd Brumen
Subject: Re: ... makes a difference
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 14:47:04 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (X11/20051013)

Hi John and all,

John W. Eaton wrote:
> 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.

I dont really agree with what is written above. And I have a suggestion:
Why not inform people about syntactic differences when the
program (octave) starts (a word or two)
or in the manual provided, i.e. a section
in the documentation book "some syntax is not compatible with matlab,
blabla".


I advocate the position that octave should not be a 1-1 copy (please
dont attack me on this) of matlab, but just implement the good features
of matlab and drop the bad ones.

I dont know but it seems more and more to me, that John thinks more
marketing-wise here.


Perhaps there could be a section in the book (the old John GNU Octave
book) that would explain the semantic differences between the two
applications.


To put my contribution here, I am prepared to latex some of the
documentation  that would inform people of the differences
between the applications or any other way that would be reasonable.
I am not a programmer, but I am quite good with latex.


regards,
gorazd


> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> 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
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 

-- 
Gorazd Brumen
Mail: address@hidden
WWW: http://valjhun.fmf.uni-lj.si/~brumen
PGP: Key at http://pgp.mit.edu, ID BCC93240



-------------------------------------------------------------
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
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