Re: New function proposal

[John W. Eaton]

On 13-Feb-2007, David Bateman wrote:

| address@hidden wrote:
| > > Michael,
| > >
| > > pipe needs changing as well. I think John needs to express what he wants
| > > done and will accept in the code to here.
| >  
| > I know "pipe" needs fixing as well, this was not my point here. If
| > it's only about
| > switching from list to cell array, then it's a single line change:
| > declare file_ids
| > as Cell of size (1,2).
| >  
| > Michael.
| >  
| Yes, it is a simple change, but where is pipe/popen2 used? Should we
| take these usages into account or just rest on the position that lists
| are deprecated and get rid of them? If we get rid of them should we use
| a cell array or or something else? In this case it might be better to
| just use two return values as there are only two elements in the lists.
| There is no point doing the work, if John doesn't like the solution and
| won't accept the code, so better that he makes some statement...

I'd say eliminate the lists and return the values in a vector.  I
think a list was required in the past because pipe returned two stream
objects but now they are just integer values (stored as doubles
though), so a vector should be fine.  We could also return two
separate values, but a vector is more like the Unix pipe system call.

jwe