From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Fri Nov  6 16:04:53 1998
Subject: one more for 2.1.10
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Joao Cardoso <jcardoso at inescn dot pt>
Cc: octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:04:33 -0600 (CST)

On  6-Nov-1998, Joao Cardoso <jcardoso at inescn dot pt> wrote:

| LOADPATH = ~/octave//::
| octave-2.1.8:1> fmt=["bo-;elf dist;"; "-15;norm porc;"; " at -g;cat
| peroi;"] 
| fmt =
| 
| bo-;elf dist; 
| -15;norm porc;
|  at -g;cat peroi;
| 
| octave-2.1.8:2> is_matrix (fmt)
| ans = 0

In the past, is_matrix returned true if the number of rows and columns
were both greater than or equal to 1, so it would return true for
non-empty strings.  But then I started thinking (dangerous!) that
maybe it should only return true for things that could act like
matrices (support addition, subtraction, etc.).  Then the result would
depend on the value of implicit_str_to_num_ok.  That's the way it
works in 2.1.10.

Why do you need it to return true for strings?  If there are good
reasons, I'm willing to change the behavior back to the way it was
before.

Thanks,

jwe