From bug-request at octave dot org Fri Dec 17 07:56:11 2004
Subject: bug in Global directive
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Peter JENSEN <peterjensen at agere dot com>
Cc: bug at octave dot org
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 08:58:00 -0500

On 17-Dec-2004, Peter JENSEN <peterjensen at agere dot com> wrote:

| ## The global directive is described on
| ## page 60 in JWE's book. From the example
| ## it looks like the global directive can
| ## take several arguments. The parser accepts
| ## this however the second variable is not
| ## accepted as global
| 
| ## I am running 2.1.58 on RH linux.
| 
| ## I see the following error message
| 
| ## octave:1> bug
| ## x = 1
| ## y = 2
| ## error: `y' undefined near line 22 column 12
| ## error: called from `print_xy_fail'
| ## error: near line 38 of file `/home/ukpj/octave/saic/sim_levels/bug.m'
| 
| 1 ;
| 
| function print_xy_fail()
|    global x,y ;
|    x
|    y
| endfunction
| 
| function print_xy_ok()
|    global x ;
|    global y ;
|    x
|    y
| endfunction
| 
| global x = 1 ;
| global y = 2 ;
| 
| print_xy_ok() ;
| print_xy_fail() ;

This is not a bug in Octave.  You must be looking at some old
documentation that does not correspond to the current behavior of the
code.  In

  global a, b

the comma is now a command separator.  In earlier versions of Octave,
the behavior was different and the comma was parsed as a separator for
the elements of the list of global variables.  This change was made
for compatibility with Matlab.  I think the current documentation
describes the current behavior.

jwe



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