Matlab compliance

[John W. Eaton]

On 23-Jul-2008, Michael D. Godfrey wrote:

| Have you thought about a "Matlab_mode" setting
| so that users could run in Matlab compliant mode or
| a mode that is accepted as better practice?  This could
| be a vector of settings to allow "picking and choosing."
| 
| You may have already decided about this. But, since
| I have not seen it mentioned, I am mentioning it now
| in the hope that it will get some review and a decision.

We used to have built-in variables that controlled things like that,
but it was the wrong thing to do for various reasons.  Two of the
biggest problems were that they could only affect behavior at
run-time, not when the function was parsed, and they were global
settings.

It might be possible to have parse-time directives to do similar
things, provided that the directive only applies to the current
function (or perhaps file) scope.  It might be worth doing this, but I
don't have the time at the moment to work on it.

jwe