From maintainers-request at octave dot org Wed Sep 29 14:47:19 2004
Subject: More MATLAB Silliness
From: Quentin Spencer <qspencer at ieee dot org>
To: octave maintainers mailing list <maintainers at octave dot org>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 19:44:53 +0000

For anyone tracking weird things that MATLAB lets you do that somebody 
might ask for in octave someday, how about this:

 >> a=ones(2,1);
 >> b(1,:)=ones(2,1);
 >> whos
  Name      Size                    Bytes  Class

  a         2x1                        16  double array
  b         1x2                        16  double array

I'm always unintentionally doing things like this in my code (assign a 
column vector to a row of a matrix), and in the past both Octave and 
MATLAB would give you an error, and I would fix it. Release 14 appears 
to have changed this to automatically detect what you meant to do and 
take care of it for you. A nice thought, I suppose, but I wonder what 
unintended consequences this could cause for an unsuspecting user. Are 
there any reasons other than convenience why this behavior is good? Any 
guesses on how many releases until they remove this feature?

Quentin