From bug-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Thu Jan 22 21:36:56 2004
Subject: STR2NUM and nasty side effects
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Schloegl Alois <alois dot schloegl at tugraz dot at>
Cc: bug-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 21:36:00 -0600

On 19-Jan-2004, Schloegl Alois <alois dot schloegl at tugraz dot at> wrote:

| I was analyzing some ascii files, which contain some configuration
| information.  Unexpectingly, the working directory has suddenly
| changed.
| 
| I tracked the problem down to STR2NUM. STR2NUM is using EVAL.

OK, maybe this is undesirable.  But if we are going to change str2num,
then I would prefer to have an interface that is compatible with
Matlab.

I noticed that Matlab's documentation says that str2num uses eval and
that it could evaluate functions which produce side effects, though I
was unable to come up with an example that did.  In any case, it also
claims that str2double avoids the use of eval, so perhaps we should
have both str2num and str2double that are compatible?

jwe



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