From bug-request at octave dot org Fri Dec  9 07:05:44 2005
Subject: Re: Input arguments for some base statistics functions
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
To: William Poetra Yoga Hadisoeseno <williampoetra at gmail dot com>
Cc: bug at octave dot org
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2005 08:04:26 -0500


On Dec 8, 2005, at 12:52 PM, William Poetra Yoga Hadisoeseno wrote:

> 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.

This was discussed on the list.  When renaming functions from
the original octave names (normal_rnd in this case) we should
have made sure that the parameters corresponded to the matlab
equivalent.

http://www.octave.org/octave-lists/archive/bug-octave.2005/msg00841.html

- Paul



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