function calls vs indexing (was Re: Extra spaces in functions)

[Doug Warner]

>>>>> "Eyal" == Eyal Doron <address@hidden> writes:

    Eyal> Hi, On the subject of extra spaces screwing up .M files in
    Eyal> whitespace_in_literal_matrix = "traditional" mode, you might
    Eyal> me interested in the following:

    Eyal>  grep -n "\[.*zeros (" lib/octave/1.1.1/m/*/*.m

The command

  grep -n "\[[^]]*[[:alpha:]]\{1,\} (" lib/octave/1.1.1/m/*/*.m

shows other function calls besides zeros.  It does miss a few cases
because of nested literal matrices.  But it can't distinguish between
function calls and variables, so that some matches to the given REGEXP
could be valid as written.  It's also impossible to distinguish
between function calls and variable indexing.  This makes automatic
dependency generation difficult.  Is there an unused symbol that could
be used to distinguish variable indexing from function calls?  Does
anyone else want such a feature?

Doug Warner