Failure in building StatDataML for Octave 2.1.57

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Mar-2004, Rafael Laboissiere <address@hidden> wrote:

| I am trying to build the StatDataML package (
| http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/StatDataML_1.0-6.tar.gz) for Debian
| using Octave 2.1.57.  Compilation fails with the following error message:
| 
| mkoctfile -I/usr/include/libxml2 -lxml2  readsdml.cc
| readsdml.cc: In function `octave_value* GetStructureData(int*, char**, 
|    xmlNode*)':
| readsdml.cc:987: error: no match for 'operator[]' in 'A[*(names++)]'
| readsdml.cc: In function `octave_value* GetDescription(xmlNode*)':
| readsdml.cc:1093: error: no match for 'operator[]' in 'S["properties"]'
| readsdml.cc:1095: error: no match for 'operator[]' in 'S[Cur->_xmlNode::name]'
| make[2]: *** [readsdml.oct] Error 1
| 
| Compilation was okay with Octave 2.1.50 and if I replace the lines like:
| 
|     Octave_map A;
|     char** names;
|     // ...      
|     A[*names++] = *GetDataset(Cur);
| 
| by:
| 
|     A.assign (*names++, *GetDataset(Cur));
|       
| then compilation with 2.1.57 succeeds.  I am wondering why the [] operator
| for the Octave_map class is not supported anymore.

Because there was no easy way to distinguish when it was used for
extracting values vs. assignment and the semantics required by each
are different.

| Is the "assign" method above backward compatible with older versions
| of Octave?

No.

jwe