Re: Reading data from m files

[Phil Fong]

> Why a .m file? It's just as easy (and faster) to
> load .mat or ascii 
> files in both Octave and Matlab. The problem here is
> that the entire 
> file must be processed by the command parser.
> Matlab's parser has become 
> much faster than Octave's in recent versions, which
> exaplains the speed 
> difference. If you really must keep your data in a
> .m file, then I think 
> it would not be difficult to write a parser as you
> suggest, which I 
> suspect would be much faster.

  As I said not all the programs were written by me. 
The main reason I saw to use .m files to store some
data is that it's an ascii format that can store
multiple variables of different sizes and types.
  I have not had the time to look closely at the
Octave  parsing code but I did notice that while
reading the m file more that half it's execution time
in top is shown as system time.  Is it making a lot of
system calls?

Phil


 
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