Re: effin' compatibility

[Paul Kienzle]

On Sep 28, 2005, at 12:42 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> Recent versions of Matlab have introduced functions like mkdir that
> return logical(1) for success and logical(0) for failure.  Octave has
> had mkdir for a long time now, but returns double(0) for success and
> double(-1) for failure, same as the underlying mkdir system call.
>
> For compatibility, I think we will have to change the behavior of
> Octave's functions.
>
> Perhaps we should rename all the posix system calls to be posix_XXX
> instead of XXX, then implement the Matlab compatible behavior in .m
> files?  Should we just do this (are these functions widely used
> anyway?) or should we expend extra effort to try to make the
> transition a bit smoother?  I don't really see a way to make a smooth
> transition that doesn't also add a lot of hassle for us, so I'm more
> in favor of just modifying the code and breaking backward
> compatibility with previous versions of Octave in this case.
>
> Comments or suggestsions?

Maybe we can introduce the notion of namespaces to sort this out?

Something like "namespace octave2" means that all subsequent
function lookups for the remainder of the current context
are done in the octave2 namespace.

This is too much work for this case alone, but this is a
recurring problem, so a general solution would be nice.  There
are a lot of details to work out about the syntax an semantics
of namespaces so it wouldn't be a quick fix.

- Paul