Re: POC for automatic bsxfun

[Levente Torok]

However, at first sight it looks very attractive, I would stick to the original version.

since I believe the syntax check that generates error in the current and past versions of octave by matching the matrix dimensions before doing computations prevented over too many of us from doing bull shit computations.

Cheers,

Lev

2011/8/17 Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden>

The attached patch makes bsxfun automatic for most binary operators.
The power operator seems to be the only one that is treated
differently, so it's not covered by this patch.

I'm not pushing this patch since it's potentially quite contentious,
but I enjoy that e.g. it's now quite easy to get the matrix of all
pairwise differences of a vector:

    x = rand(5,1);
    d = x - x';

which I think is a definite improvement over

    d = bsxfun(@minus, x, x');

not to mention less obscure and more likely to be discovered with
experimentation. If this idea sticks, I would like to write additions
to the manual to explain this behaviour, how it differs from Matlab,
when to use it, and when to avoid it.

What do you guys think?

- Jordi G. H.