From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Thu Nov 20 01:57:39 1997
Subject: Octave/Matlab compatibility
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Gopalakrishnan Harikumar <gharikum at trc dot tellabs dot com>
Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 01:58:30 -0600

On 19-Nov-1997, Gopalakrishnan Harikumar <gharikum at trc dot tellabs dot com> wrote:

| I am running octave 2.0.9 on Linux 2.0.30.
| I have read the faq on minimizing the differences
| between octave and matlab, and put the following in
| my .octaverc file:

Unfortunately, the FAQ is horribly out of date (would anyone be
interested in updating and maintaining it?).

Running Octave with th --traditional option provides the most
compatible settings.

| My problem is that some  matlab files still do
| not work properly under octave. For example, the function
| psd in Matlab's signal processing toolbox. 
| 
| For example, the following two lines which work okay in Matlab 4.x
| 
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^6
| 
| a = randn(100,1)
| pa = psd(a,16,1,16) 
| 
| gives the following errors:
| 
| error: octave_base_value::string_value(): wrong type argument `matrix'
| error: eval: expecting string argument
| error: evaluating index expression near line 42, column 43
| error: evaluating assignment expression near line 42, column 42
| error: called from `psd' in file 
| 
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
| 
| Are there any more variables that I have to set? 

I can't tell if this is a bug, because I don't know what psd is
supposed to do.  If you think there is a bug, please send a complete
bug report to to bug-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu dot 

Please DO NOT send portions of functions from a Matlab toolbox as a
way of explaining what is going wrong, as I suspect your license
agreement doesn't permit redistribution of the Matlab toolboxes.

Thanks,

jwe