From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Wed May  5 16:04:34 1999
Subject: Re: operation x=x(:)
From: Wonkoo Kim <wkim+ at pitt dot edu>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
CC: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Wed, 05 May 1999 17:04:01 -0400

John W. Eaton wrote:
> 
> On  5-May-1999, oliver dot eichler at gmx dot de <oliver.eichler@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> | One of the biggest drawbacks to use it is the missing
> | 'x=x(:)' operation.
> 
> I'm not sure why you say that it is missing.  Octave has understood
> colon indexing for a long time.  In versions 2.0.12 and later, I
> believe that it works in a Matlab-compatible way no matter what the
> value of do_fortran_indexing.  For earlier versions, you had to set
> do_fortran_indexing to 1 (or, for really ancient versions, "yes") to
> enable compatible behavior.
> 
>   GNU Octave, version 2.0.14 (i686-pc-linux-gnu).
>   Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 John W. Eaton.
>   This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
>   For details, type `warranty'.
> 
>   octave:1> x = rand (2)
>   x =
> 
>     0.14962  0.13838
>     0.98633  0.30464
> 
>   octave:2> x = x(:)
>   x =
> 
>     0.14962
>     0.98633
>     0.13838
>     0.30464

However, x = x(:) does not convert a row vector to a column vector
(Octave 2.0.13 for OS/2).  Though I don't mind this, but the 
original poster would, as this is a different behavior from Matlab.

//-------------------------------------------------------------------
// Wonkoo Kim <wkim+ at pitt dot edu>