Re: proposed parser changes

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 7:33 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm thinking about modifying the parser to remove the special "command"
>  and "rawcommand" tags for symbols and instead use the surrounding
>  context to decide when the parser is looking at a command-style
>  function.  This change would improve compatibility with Matlab.
>
>  I resisted this kind of change in the past because I didn't like the
>  following behavior of Matlab:
>
>  Given a function foo, the expression
>
>   foo -1
>
>  would call foo with the character string "-1" as an argument but
>
>   foo - 1
>   foo-1
>   foo- 1
>
>  would all call foo with no arguments, then subtract 1 from the value
>  it returned.
>
>  Now I'm beginning to think the advantage of improved compatibility and
>  not having to tag functions as commands outweighs the trouble that
>  might be caused by this small inconsistency.
>
>  Also, we no longer mark any functions in Octave or Octave Forge with
>  the "rawcommand" tag.  It was only used to support the special syntax
>  used by gset/gplot/gsplot.  Now that those are gone I see no reason to
>  keep the "rawcommand" tag in any case.
>
>  Comments?
>

I think it's a good idea, as writing custom commands previously
required adding mark_as_command to some startup script - I suppose
that will no longer be necessary.

>  jwe
>



-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz