Re: function definitions in tests

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Jan-2010, David Grundberg wrote:

| I changed eval_string on purpose to disallow open function bodies on 
| EOF. Open ends are IMHO a bad construct that are especially confusing 
| when several functions are defined. I don't think application writers 
| should rely on eval () allowing open ends.

I agree that it would be better to have all "function" tokens matched
by "endfunction", but your change to the test function broke tests
that already ended with "endfunction", so I think it is best to
restore the previous behavior until we decide what is the right thing
to do.

| On the other hand, I think it's clear that %!function blocks are ended 
| with their indention, they don't need an endfunction. If we allow an 
| endfunction token, then we should reasonably also support this syntax:
| 
| %!function foobar()
| %!  # indented function body
| %!functionend
| 
| But this doesn't work well with test.m as it is now, because it reads 
| indention, it doesn't analyse syntax.

If you want to disallow EOF ending a function body in an eval string,
then I think we should require that functions defined in tests have
endfunction tokens rather than complicating the test code by changing
it to do any more complex parsing of input than it already does.  But
doing that would require a lot of changes, not only to tests in
Octave, but also to tests in Octave Forge and likely lots of other
code.  My guess is that it would not make users happy.  And they
probably would also not like it much if we require them to *not* use
"endfunction" when writing tests.

In any case, I don't see the harm in allowing the end of an eval
string to work the same as an end of file when parsing a function.
What trouble does that cause?

jwe