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Re: Octave's and Matlab's limitations


From: Kjetil brinchmann Halvorsen
Subject: Re: Octave's and Matlab's limitations
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2012 14:03:18 -0300

see inline.

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 1:01 PM, Francesco Potortì <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>  Can S (or R) do something like the following?
>>>
>>> A([1:2:97 98 99], 1:end-1) = 0;
>>>
>>Of course. An example:
>>
>>A=matrix(rnorm(100*100),100,100)
>>A[c(seq(1,97,2),98,99),c(1:(nrow(A)-1))]<-0
>
> Well, this is done using functions, it is not a feature of the language
> itself.

R is a functional language, the language itself is built from
functions, not from syntax as in non-functional languages. So to say
"Well, this is done using functions, it is not a feature of the
language itself.  " doesn't really makes sense for R. The point is
that this has been a part of the language from befor matlab even
existed.   It might be that matlab's version is marginally more
expressive (really shorter, or marginally more readable), but then in
R, as a functional language, it is possible to extend
the syntax by user functions, even extending this syntax to new kinds
of objects, simply by defining new replacements functions. So R's
version is probably more adaptive, flexible than matlab's.

Kjetil

It definitely makes sense to speak of the Matlab indexing
> notation, which is a more powerful evolution of the S notation and, in
> my opinion, is the killing feature of Matlab/Octave (and apparently of Julia).
>
> --
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