Re: Robustness against accidental shadowing of 'core' functions

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 22:57:20 +0200, Kai Torben Ohlhus wrote:
> The examples of accidental function shadowing are even worse, sometimes
> trivial, sometimes subtile.  See some examples from our mailing-list
> [2-4].  Just look for "shadow" and you'll find some.  That is the price to
> pay for this feature, like all languages offer features, that have to be
> used with care (bad memory access [off by one errors] in C, MS Office macro
> malware, ...).  You cannot simply defeat against/imagine as developer all
> of the mistakes of bad intentions of human beings.

I agree with Kai in general here. The ability to shadow core function
names is both a feature and a problem. There are going to continue to be
problems, and users and developers both have to be aware of it and deal
with it.

> If the package is so prominent, file a bug report [5] for Octave
> compatibility or fork the project (MIT licence) if the developers are not
> responsive (4 open bugs, last commit 10 months ago, 17 commits in total).

I agree, this looks like a typical Octave porting issue. The developer
of the project in question just needs to be aware of some small Octave
compatibility issues and work with them.

-- 
mike

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