From maintainers-request at octave dot org Wed Aug  4 13:34:58 2004
Subject: cell(idx) = [] (was: Re: Re-implementation of inline functions)
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: David Bateman <David dot Bateman at motorola dot com>
Cc: maintainers at octave dot org
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 14:33:57 -0400

On  4-Aug-2004, David Bateman <David dot Bateman at motorola dot com> wrote:

| > |   * finish implementation of cell arrays and struct arrays:
| > |       -- cell(idx) = [] to delete elements
| > |       -- a(1).x = 1; a(2).x = 2; a.x => c.s. list, [a.x] => num array
| > |       -- allow [x{:}] = f (...) to work
| > |       -- and other little details like this...
| > 
| > I've done some work on some of these problems but have not had time to
| > finish them.  The third item is a bit tricky and may require some
| > changes to the interface of the octave_value::subsasgn method, so this
| > is a priority for me if we are going to try to minimize internal
| > interface changes for the 3.x series.

| The first one seems pretty easy to me as the change is isolated to
| the '(' case of subsref for cell arrays, and examples of how to 
| treat this case already exist for NDArrays.

I think we need a special type (or some other way) to represent [] so
that it can be distinguished from "zeros (0, 0)".

jwe