Re: problems with optimset option name completion in 3.8.0

[Olaf Till]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 01:45:11PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 01/06/2014 01:31 PM, Olaf Till wrote:
> >On Fri, Jan 03, 2014 at 11:34:46PM +0100, Olaf Till wrote:
> >>...
> >>1) consider it illegitimate to have option names whose first
> >>    characters are equal to a different full option name (means I have
> >>    to change the option names in the said functions of the optim
> >>    package!),
> >>
> >>2) change optimset so that it always matches an option name if it is
> >>    given in full, even if there is a longer option name which starts
> >>    with the same characters,
> >>
> >>3) drop option name completion in optimset.
> >>...
> >
> >No response means I have to go ahead with 1).
> 
> Sorry for not replying earlier.
> 
> I would prefer to not have the abbreviated keyword matching feature,
> but I think we have to keep it because Matlab users expect it to
> work that way.  And in case you haven't been looking at the bug
> tracker lately, we get bug reports for all sorts of trivial
> differences, so I expect we would get a report if we disabled
> matching of abbreviated names in optimset.

Ok. I didn't know that Matlab matches abbreviated option names, I
didn't find this in their documentation.

> I assume that Matlab
> doesn't have any sets of options that have the "foo" vs. "foolonger"
> problem?

It hasn't, AFAIK. So we can't check if Matlab possibly behaves like
option 2) above. It's probably better not to use 2) in Octave, it
would be bizarr. So option 1) is the only possible.

Regards, Olaf

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