From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Tue Dec 31 19:28:24 2002
Subject: Re: fprintf compatibility
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Cc: octave-maintainers mailing list <octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 20:28:49 -0500

John W. Eaton wrote:

>What do you think about this feature of Matlab?
>
>  >> fprintf ('%s\n', [111; 100; 100]);
>  odd
>
>I know that Matlab (originally, anyway, though perhaps not anymore)
>stores strings as double precision matrices with a flag set saying to
>interpret the numbers as ASCII and print them as strings, etc.  But
>the matrix here is not even tagged as a string!
>
>So, should Octave copy this bug^H^H^Hfeature?
>
Won't this happen already with implicit_num_to_str_ok = 1?

Okay, no it doesn't.

Even if it did, shouldn't it output the following:

o
d
d

I have nothing in particular against implicit char->num/num->char, but I 
also don't
mind putting setstr() around the matrices.  I'm a little disappointed that
sprintf('%s\n',['o';'d';'d']) doesn't print a column though.

- Paul