Re: ... makes a difference

[kamaraju kusumanchi]

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.
>
> 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
>  
This must have already been discussed before. But I am relatively a 
newcomer to octave world.

How about adding an option to octave say -matlab-compat? When octave is 
run with -matlab-compat option, it behaves exactly like matlab (nothing 
more, nothing less) would behave. When the -matlab-compat option is not 
specified, octave can do whatever octave thinks is the right way of 
doing things.

What do the gurus think about this idea? Too much overhead to the code?

--
Kamaraju S Kusumanchi
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/kk288/
http://malayamaarutham.blogspot.com/



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