From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Tue Dec 17 16:58:41 2002
Subject: dynamic loaded functions only?
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: "Albert F. Niessner" <Al dot Niessner at jpl dot nasa dot gov>
Cc: Octave Help <help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 16:58:25 -0600

On 17-Dec-2002, Albert F. Niessner <Al dot Niessner at jpl dot nasa dot gov> wrote:

| It appears as though I can only have dynamically loaded functions in
| octave. Is it possible to have procedures instead?
| 
| To clarify, functions have no side effects and all inputs are passed by
| value. What I would like to have is a procedure that modifies the matrix
| that is input in place -- a procedure. As an example, lets say the input
| is a 2 GB time domain series that I want to examine in the frequency
| domain. Having three copies of it would exceed my the available memory
| on my linux box. Hence, I would like to write an in-place FFT routine,
| but the args(0).matrix_value returns a copy of what I pass in from the
| octave command line. I looked through ov-base.h and did not see anything
| other than matrix_value -- I was hoping for a matrix_reference or
| something.
| 
| So, how do I get dynamically loaded procedures as well as functions?

I think your real question is, "can I have pass-by-reference semantics
in Octave?" and the answer is no, not without modifying the way
Octave's interpreter works.

jwe



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