How does one use the i operator with constants so that Octave recognizes
the i as the imaginary operator?
I maybe mistaken as to how it is implemented in Octave, but I believe that "i" is a constant, not an operator.
For your example, I believe that just
> w*L*i
would work.
The problem is that when parsing the line w*Li, the parser has no idea (and can't know to my knowledge) that when you type Li you mean L*i and not some variable named Li. Its the same reason you can't type that _expression_ as wLi, since the parser will look for a variable named wLi and not calculate w*L*i.