Re: Octave's and Matlab's limitations

[Kjetil brinchmann Halvorsen]

see inline.

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 6:49 AM, Francesco Potortì <address@hidden> wrote:
>>Though I agree with you that typically more than one language is
>>necessary, there is _nothing_ Matlab/Octave can do and other language
>>can't with the same ease or even easier and more elegantly and less
>>bug-prone.
>
> I think that the winning feature of Octave is the index notation and the
> ease to access submatrices with a readable and intuitive syntax.  That
> is, what is known as the Matlab index notation.  Are there any other
> languages that allow such indexing power and clarity?

R is close:
  mat <- matrix(1:16, nrow=4, ncol=4)
 mat[1:2,1:2]  is the upper 2x2 diagonal block
mat[ , 3:4]         is the 4x2 matrix which consists of the last two
cols (note the empty first argument meaning "all of"
and so on. And remember that this comes from S, which was invented 10
years before matlab came into existence.
So the "matlab index notation" should really be called the "S index notation".

Kjetil

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