Re: Possible (summer of code) projects for Octave

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-Jan-2011, bpabbott wrote:

| On Jan 05, 2011, at 08:25 AM, Jaroslav Hajek <address@hidden> wrote:
| 
|     >> My favorite is implementing the OOP versions of delaunay triangulation
|     >> and interpolation functions. See
|     >> http://www.mathworks.ch/help/techdoc/ref/delaunaytriclass.html
|     >> http://www.mathworks.ch/help/techdoc/ref/trirepclass.html
|     >> http://www.mathworks.ch/help/techdoc/ref/triscatteredinterpclass.html

| I mentioned it would help with OOP in Octave since (I assume) Matlab's new OOP
| syntax, which is not yet currently implemented in Octave, would be requried.
| I'm not familiar with how that should be done, but I suspect this is the same
| thing Søren had mentioned.
| 
| * Implement support for object oriented programming using 'classdef'.

Looking at the Matlab docs, it seems that the classes described in the
links above are "value" classes, but probably defined using the
new-style OO (classdef) rather than the old (@classname directories).

I haven't tried to do a detailed comparison of the semantics of these
two styles of defining value classes, so I'm not sure whether it is
possible to implement everything that is now possible with classdef
using the old style @classname directories.  But even if it is, it
would be nice to not clutter Octave with a lot of classes defined
using an obsolete (and at least semi-redundant) style of OO
programming that we would probably just want to update later.  So
really, I think it would be best if we first had classdef support for
value classes.  Just doing that and skipping the new "handle classes"
would be a nice first step.  And probably easier too, as we already
have one type of value class implemented now.

Another thing we could use is Matlab-compatible "namespaces", I think
would make it possible to provide interfaces compatible with what
Matlab has for accessing cdflib and netcdf functions.

But enough of this dreaming.  It is not helping the 3.4 release happen
any faster...

jwe