From help-request at octave dot org Wed Oct  6 11:43:04 2004
Subject: Re: Accessing information returned from 'dir'
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: etienne at cs dot uky dot edu
Cc: mddejong at xs4all dot nl, Geraint Paul Bevan <g.bevan@eng.gla.ac.uk>,         help@octave.org
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 12:38:43 -0400

On  6-Oct-2004, Etienne Grossmann <etienne at cs dot uky dot edu> wrote:

|   But, it the following normal? Or is my mind trapped in the good ol'
| days of lists?
| 
|     octave:3> foo = cell(3,4); bar = foo{:,1}; typeinfo (foo)
|     ans = cell
| 
|     octave:4> typeinfo (bar)
| 
|     *** typeinfo:
| 
|     - Built-in Function:  typeinfo (EXPR)
|     Return the type of the expression EXPR, as a string.  If EXPR  is
|     omitted, return an array of strings containing all the currently
|     installed data types.

The expression foo{:,1} returns a comma-separated list (in Matlab, you
would not even be able to perform the assignment to the variable bar
-- should Octave also make this an error?).  When you pass a
comma-separated list to a function, you are passing each element as a
separate argument.  The typeinfo function expects a single argument,
but you are passing three.

jwe



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