deprecated builtin variables (was Re: Problem with reading lists)

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Mar-2005, Quentin Spencer <address@hidden> wrote:

| OK, looking at my updated code again, I see that there are references to 
| three builtin variables that may no longer be relevant:
| empty_list_elements_ok, warn_empty_list_elements, and 
| prefer_column_vectors. The only one of these three that octave 2.1.67 
| recognizes is warn_empty_list_elements. Have the others been 
| removed/deprecated?

Yes, they have been removed.  I recently noticed that some code in
octave-forge now does things like this:

  try dfi = do_fortran_indexing;   catch dfi = 0; end
  try wfi = warn_fortran_indexing; catch wfi = 0; end
  unwind_protect
    do_fortran_indexing = 1;
    warn_fortran_indexing = 0;
    ## code that relies on these settings
    ## ...
    ## ...
    ## ...
  unwind_protect_cleanup
    do_fortran_indexing = dfi;
    warn_fortran_indexing = wfi;
  end_unwind_protect

I understand the goal of keeping some level of backward compatibility,
but I hope that eventually this cruft can be removed.

As an aside, I would not bother trying to set warn_fortran_indexing to
false in code like this since that is the default value.  If someone
sets that variable to true, then they should expect a few warnings.

jwe



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