From owner-help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Thu Nov 28 03:31:26 1996
Subject: Feature, not bug
From: Heber Farnsworth <heberf at u dot washington dot edu>
To: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 01:30:37 -0800 (PST)

Here is a little thing I noticed which is not really a problem but could
probably be handled better.  Suppose you type the name of a file in your
load path which is not a function file.  I did this when I accidentally
typed

octave:2> non2.oct

when I meant to type 'load non2.oct'.  I got the following

non2.oct =

panic: impossible state reached in file `tc-rep.cc' at line 1764
error: Illegal instruction -- stopping myself...

This is not a problem since Octave quits nice and cleanly (thanks to good
programming by jwe) but perhaps it could be handled better.  This would
have been very frustrating if I had spent a long time manipulating some
data but had not saved it.  It would be flushed because of a silly typing
error.

Just a thought.

  Heber Farnsworth                               | Department of Finance
  Univerity of Washington                        | Box 353200
  tele:  (206) 528-0793 home                     | Seattle, WA 98195-3200
  tele:  (206) 543-4773 finance     web: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~heberf
  fax:   (206) 685-9392             email: heberf at u dot washington dot edu