help with load command

[Charles Hannah]

I trust that this is appropriate place to ask
stupid questions about octave.

The load command.
In matlab I can read a list of numbers in a file test.dat
by typing    
   load test.dat
The list gets placed in a variable test

This does not seem to work in the version of octave I am running
(octave-0.74).  Should it?  Or do I have to write a C-style
function to do this?

Thanks, Charles Hannah 
address@hidden