Re: Octave 2.2.x Was: A group in Norway ...

[John W. Eaton]

On 20-Jun-2003, Andy Adler <address@hidden> wrote:

| The big question is: "how far out is 3.0?"
| If 3.0 is a year or more out (realistically), then I suggest we
| do the easy and essential stuff, and leave the rest for 3.0.
| 
| My ratings:
| 
| Easy (by taking the octave-forge implementation)
|   * sparse matrices

Is this ready to be a part of the core Octave distribution?  How much
work would it take?

|   * inline functions (octave-forge has a "hack", but adequate)

I would vote against putting in any quick hacks unless they are
essential.  It would probably be better (and maybe not that hard) to
go ahead and implement inline functions properly.

| Essential
|   * clean up the load-save mess

I think this might be a relatively hard problem, which is why it
hasn't been fixed yet.  But maybe what I think cleaning up the mess
means is different from what you are thinking about.  I mean that we
need some reasonable way to handle loading and saving user-defined
types, and also we need to decide whether it is worth trying to
support N different file types (HDF5, MAT4, MAT5, Octave binary,
Octave ASCII, etc.) in the load command.

|   * bring the manual up to date (this can be done during
|      the 2.2.x series)

Yes, this is definitely something that needs work, but no one ever
seems to want to work on it.

jwe