From bug-request at octave dot org Thu Dec  8 11:53:51 2005
Subject: Input arguments for some base statistics functions
From: William Poetra Yoga Hadisoeseno <williampoetra at gmail dot com>
To: bug at octave dot org
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2005 01:52:17 +0800

Some functions take different input arguments as their Matlab
counterparts. For example, in Matlab, normrnd takes the mean (mu) and
standard deviation (sigma), according to the docs (I believe the docs
this time, since my teacher says so and everyone in class uses it, but
I'll check it on my teacher's laptop tomorrow). But in Octave, normrnd
takes the mean (mu) and variance (sigma squared). It's not only
normrnd, but also all the other functions AFAIK.

Should we fix this? The main problem is that existing scripts will
break... I myself have this check at the start of my scripts:

if (abs(var(normrnd(0,10,100000,1))-10) < 1.5)
  z=25;
else
  z=5;
end

where the desired standard deviation is 5.

--
William Poetra Yoga Hadisoeseno



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