indexing cell arrays

[Thorsten Meyer]

Hi,

Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Thorsten Meyer<address@hidden> wrote:
  

Hi,

While working on the documentation of container types, I found that it is no
longer possible to assign to a subarray of cell array c like this:
 c{:,2} = 1
    

Yes. The correct way is c(:,2) = {1}. I think c(:,2) = 1 still works
as well. But c{:,2} was surely wrong, because it produces a cs-list
(and thus represents a sequence of lvalues rather than one).
  

Also, in the manual, there is an (obsolete) example that shows how to set elements of a cell array to [] with
    c{:,2}= []     (generates an error in octave 3.1!)
and eliminate elements with
    c(:,2) = []

I found, that the first of the two can now be achieved by
    c(:,2) = {[]}
And the second still works, as does
    c(:,2) = 3

So a scalar gets promoted to a cell array with one entry, while the null_matrix has the special meaning of eliminating entries in a cell array (and other array types).

Is this consistent with matlab?

Thorsten