How do I translate Matlab's colon into Octave?

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-Sep-1997, Dirk Laurie <address@hidden> wrote:

| 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?

Invoke Octave with --traditional:

  bevo:2> octave --traditional
  Octave, version 2.0.9 (alpha-dec-osf3.2).
  Copyright (C) 1996, 1997 John W. Eaton.
  This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
  For details, type `warranty'.

  >> x = [1,2,3;4,5,6]
  x =

    1  2  3
    4  5  6

  >> x(:)
  ans =

    1
    4
    2
    5
    3
    6

  >> y = [6,5;4,3;2,1]
  y =

    6  5
    4  3
    2  1

  >> y(:) = x
  y =

    1  5
    4  3
    2  6


Or, if you just want to change the indexing behavior, set the built-in
variable do_fortran_indexing to 1.

jwe