From bug-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Mon Sep 22 16:51:50 1997
Subject: Unidentified subject!
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: "Richard J. Shaw" <rjs at gj3 dot bio dot bris dot ac dot uk>
Cc: bug-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 16:50:48 -0500

On 16-Sep-1997, Richard J. Shaw <rjs at gj3 dot bio dot bris dot ac dot uk> wrote:

| To: bug-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
| Subject: rand("string", n) confusion
| 
| Bug report for Octave 2.0.9 configured for i586-pc-linux-gnu
| 
| Description:
| -----------
| 
| This is a much more minor bug report than I thought it was going to be!
| 
| rand(string, number) seems to accept any string as its first parameter, rather
| than just "seed". Only the latter appears to produce the expected effect.
| 
| In particular, rand("SEED", n) has no apparent effect but a naive user
| (i.e. me!) might misinterpret the output of "help rand", specifically
| 
| "rand (SEED, N)  -- set seed"
| 
| to indicate that an upper-case spelling was appropriate (despite several
| years of experience of Matlab help pages!).
| 
| I have now discovered that "help -i rand" gives the correct information but I
| report this phenomenon for the additional reason that Octave also accepts 
| such typos as
| 
| rand("seeed", n)
| 
| without warning and without (the expected) effect.

For future releases, I fixed this so Octave will print an error
message if the argument doesn't match "seed".  I also fixed the doc
strings for rand and randn.

Thanks,

jwe