Re: dispatch

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Feb-2005, David Bateman <address@hidden> wrote:

| My feelings are that as the wish list for version 3 included private 
| directories and that classes are an extension of the same idea, and so 
| not necessary all that much extra work, that version 3.0 should take the 
| time to include a matlab compatiable version of classes. However it 
| seems to me that dispatch in and of itself is valuable, even with 
| classes, and so importing dispatch into octave seems logical and I'd 
| suggest leaving it there even after classes are introduced. In that case 
| why not go the way of the quick fix, and migrate the dispatching of the 
| sparse functions to use classes as they are introduced....

OK, this seems reasonable.  Unless there are any objections, I will
try to move dispatch into the core Octave soon.  Once that is done,
I'd like to go ahead and merge the sparse code and make an unstable
snapshot (probably with a version number like 2.1.90 or 2.9.0 as you
suggested earlier).

| It seems to me that classes/private directories are the last major
| item on the 3.0 wishlist, so hopefully the wait won't be too long :-)

I would also like to solve the problem of

  [a_cell_array{:}] = foo ();

before the next "stable" release, because I think that it may require
some changes to the internals (subsref/subsasgn).

jwe