Re: About diagonal matrices

[Daniel J Sebald]

Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

> I think that what Octave does now for sparse * scalar is certainly
> better than what Matlab does; I'd keep it that way. Otherwise, when
> you do scalar * sparse, and just by coincidence scalar happens to be
> Inf or NaN, you fill up the memory; bang, you're dead (or your
> computation is).

A conversation about this came up at the "OctaConf" a few years back, one of the ideas being that a 
sparse matrix not necessarily have 0 as the "sparse default value".  That is, the "sparse 
default value" could be any number, 0, NaN, Inf, 2.33, etc.

I'll say more about this in a follow up to David's email...

Dan