Re: goals for 3.1

[David Bateman]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> I'm not sure about additional fucntions but in addition to working on
> numeric data, these functionns should also work on character, struct,
> and cell arrays.
>
>   

There is a compatibility issue with the triu, tril and diag functions
with structure arrays between Octave and Matlab. Basically Matlab
doesn't allow structure arrays with these functions, but Octave does..
However what is returned by Octave doesn't really make any sense.. Consider

 d =  triu (struct ('fld',num2cell([1,2;3,4])))
 d(2,1).fld

The triu on the struct returns the cell (2,1) with an empty octave-value
and so d(2,1).fld returns nothing. This is quite a surprising and
probably useless feature.. Similar issues exist in tril and diag. Should
we keep this feature, it which case it should be documented, or should
we just fail for structures like Matlab does?

Regards
David

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