Updating who/whos

[John W. Eaton]

On  4-Feb-2004, Oyvind Kristiansen <address@hidden> wrote:

| I've written a patch for updating who/whos.
| 
| What's new:
| -ability to print information on memory used by variables
| -ability to print descriptor of dimensions, instead of just rows and cols
| (as it is today)
| 
| Two internal variables now rule the output from who/whos:
| -who_traditional=true|false (defaults to false), tells Octave what
| ordering is to be used per line of information, and what kind of
| information is to be displayed. who_traditional=true will
| cause an output similar to the output from who/whos in Matlab.
| who_traditional=true, will cause an output much like the existing output.
| -who_print_dims controls how many dimensions will be displayed. In Matlab,
| when an array is 2x3x2x4, Matlab will tell it's a 4-D array. Octave will
| check who_print_dims to find out how to print this information.

I agree that whos needs to be updated for N-d arrays objects, but I'm
not sure that we need to have output that exactly mimics the output
from Matlab.  But maybe there is a reason that is needed.  If so, what
is it?

So, I think I would prefer to see the format updated so that it always
displays the full list of dimensions (at least up to some more
reasonable limit -- perhaps 8 would be enough for most uses.)

Displaying the number of bytes used is also reasonable.

Currently, Octave displays information about whether a variable is
read-only but even I can't remember what the code means, and I don't
think it is particularly useful, so maybe that could go away.

Or, if you really think that there should be multiple output formats
allowed, then I think a much better solution would be to provide a way
to control the output using some kind of format string.

Comments?

jwe