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Re: ... makes a difference


From: Miquel Cabanas
Subject: Re: ... makes a difference
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:03:02 +0100

hi,

On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 14:47 +0100, Gorazd Brumen wrote:
>
> 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
> > ...
> > 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

I no longer use Matlab. Thus, on one side I should care a dime about
Matlab compatibility, but on the other side I'm glad I can benefit from
all the freeware Matlab code out there with minor editing or no editing
at all... If I balance both sides I'm reluctant to give up that little
joy just for the sake of not doing something a la Matlab

> 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 see a problem here: how to decide which are good features and which
are not.. There will be discrepancies, and some will want something
others will hate...

Which Matlab features you think are so bad that it compensates to keep
Octave incompatible?

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

(If John were to be thinking marketing-wise he would be working at
TMW ;-)

As he stated in his message, he's talking out of his past experience on
the Matlab compatibility subject. You can find more about Octave and its
relationship with Matlab, and how it has evolved with time, in

http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/DSC-2001/Proceedings/Eaton.pdf

http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/DSC-2003/Drafts/EatonRawlings.pdf

or in his message last paragraph.

> > 
> > 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.
> > 

Miquel






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