From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Jan  9 22:57:31 2004
Subject: the -force option for load
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: octave-maintainers mailing list <octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2004 22:57:14 -0600

Long ago, I decided that Octave should not overwrite variables in the
workspace when loading a file, but I provided a -force option for load
that would allow people to override this behavior if desired.
Unfortuantely, there is no convenient way to modify this behavior
globally, so one must edit the source code to add the -force option
when porting Matlab scripts.  I think I'd like to make Octave's load
behave like Matlab by default now.  The -force option will continue to
be accepted but will do nothing.  But should we also provide a
"-noforce" or "-no-overwrite" option to preserve the previous behavior?
Another option would be to have a "load_overwrites" variable, but I'd
prefer to avoid any more of those kinds of (mis)features.

Comments?

jwe