Re: Matlab incompatibility: cd and which

[Mike Miller]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 16:26:10 -0400, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 10/14/2013 04:03 PM, PhilipNienhuis wrote:
>>
>> John W. Eaton wrote
>>>
>>> On 10/14/2013 03:36 PM, PhilipNienhuis wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Michael Goffioul wrote
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>> <snip>
>>>>>
>>>>> 2) "cd" without argument changes to home dir, while in Matlab it simply
>>>>> returns the current directory.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Also on Linux-based Matlab? or only on Windows? (could be OS-dependent)
>>>> I can't test now, my ML prerelease has expired a few weeks ago.
>>>>
>>>> What does ML do on Mac OSX?
>>>
>>>
>>> I don't think the behavior is dependent on the OS.  There is certainly
>>> no mention of that in the Matlab docs.
>>
>>
>> Hmm... there's more mention of Matlab behavior missing in their docs :-)
>>
>> But I agree the on-line ML doc for "cd" is quite unambiguous.
>
>
> Sure, and the behavior of cd in Unixy shells  is also quite well
> established.

And "help cd" in Octave is pretty upfront about the incompatibility as well.

> [...]
>
> If people really think that Matlab compatibility at this level is
> paramount, then I'd say we should change Octave's bahavior to match.
> But we will probably also break a some Octave code that expects "cd"
> to change to the user's home directory.  We can't have it both ways.

And both behaviors have perfectly acceptible alternate ways to achieve
the same thing much less ambiguously.

I like having the Octave shell behave just like I'm used to in bash,
but I would be ok with changing to be more compatible, and training
myself to do "cd ~" instead.

-- 
mike