Re: Octave's and Matlab's limitations

[Francesco Potortì]

>> I think that the winning feature of Octave is the index notation and the
>> ease to access submatrices with a readable and intuitive syntax.  That
>> is, what is known as the Matlab index notation.  Are there any other
>> languages that allow such indexing power and clarity?
>
>R is close:
>  mat <- matrix(1:16, nrow=4, ncol=4)
> mat[1:2,1:2]  is the upper 2x2 diagonal block
>mat[ , 3:4]         is the 4x2 matrix which consists of the last two
>cols (note the empty first argument meaning "all of"
>and so on. And remember that this comes from S, which was invented 10
>years before matlab came into existence.
>So the "matlab index notation" should really be called the "S index notation".

Can S (or R) do something like the following?

A([1:2:97 98 99], 1:end-1) = 0;

-- 
Francesco Potortì (ricercatore)        Voice:  +39.050.315.3058 (op.2111)
ISTI - Area della ricerca CNR          Mobile: +39.348.8283.107
via G. Moruzzi 1, I-56124 Pisa         Skype:  wnlabisti
(entrance 20, 1st floor, room C71)     Web:    http://fly.isti.cnr.it