Re: Opinions for linspace behavior

[Juan Pablo Carbajal]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 10:39 PM, rik <address@hidden> wrote:
> 8/26/15
>
> All,
>
> While fixing bug #45820 (https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?45820) I found that
> Octave implements a superset of Matlab's linspace behavior.  For linspace
> (A, B, N), Matlab only accepts scalars while Octave will also accept row or
> column vectors.  The current behavior is to transform everything into a
> column vector and then expand.  For example,
>
> linspace ([1 2], 3, 5)
> ans =
>
>    1.0000   1.5000   2.0000   2.5000   3.0000
>    2.0000   2.2500   2.5000   2.7500   3.0000
>
> This goes against my intuition.  I would expect that a row vector would be
> expanded "down" to increase the number of rows while a column vector would
> be expanded "right" to increase the number of columns.  I've created a
> patch that does this and the results are shown below.
>
> octave:2> linspace ([1 2], 3, 5)
> ans =
>
>    1.0000   2.0000
>    1.5000   2.2500
>    2.0000   2.5000
>    2.5000   2.7500
>    3.0000   3.0000
>
> octave:3> linspace ([1 2]', 3, 5)
> ans =
>
>    1.0000   1.5000   2.0000   2.5000   3.0000
>    2.0000   2.2500   2.5000   2.7500   3.0000
>
> What are people's opinions about this change?  Is anyone actually using
> this feature of Octave in their code?
>
> Cheers,
> Rik
>

I did not know about this feature (ergo never used it). nevertheless
your fix looks correct and intuitive to me.