How do I translate Matlab's colon into Octave?

[Dirk Laurie]

I've got zillions of old Matlab 3.5 routines that rely on one of the
following devices:

  1.  x(:) returns the contents of x as a column vector
  2.  y(:)=x assigns the contents of x to y, retaining the 
      present shape of y

It seems that these tricks do not work in Octave.  Are there
alternatives that do not involve massive re-coding?

Dirk Laurie