sparse functions abort instead of memory exhausted

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-Jan-2012, John W. Eaton wrote:

| On  5-Jan-2012, marco atzeri wrote:
| 
| | on cygwin with latest tip
| 
| Please give the output of "hg id".  Mercurial archives have a single
| "tip" revision, but that might not be on the branch you are using.
| Specifying the exact changeset ID uniquely identifies what sources
| you are using.
| 
| | on several sparse functions I noticed
| | 
| | octave:19> sprand(1e5,1e5,.1)
| | panic: Aborted -- stopping myself...
| | attempting to save variables to `octave-core'...
| | save to `octave-core' complete
| 
| I don't see this behavior on my system.  I get an out of memory error
| as you saw with previous versions.

I should add that the behavior I see is with both

  e530656055ae (default branch)
  f1ff06a1d73a (stable branch)

Also, I'm using a 64-bit system with 16GB of memory.  I haven't tried
this example on a 32-bit system, or a system with less memory.

jwe