On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 10:13:29AM +0100, Olaf Till wrote: > ... > > Why would it be bad to copy the Matlab interfaces (I've never used them > > so I'm asking out of ignorance) ? Are they simply poor interfaces? > > I just meant that we should think that over. (One issue that occurs to > me immediately is the name: 'lsq...' seems to stand for 'least > squares', which is too special since one could have optimizers which > optimize with respect to other things than least squares).
Just realized that much of this decision is long over, since Octave seems to copy the functionality of Matlabs 'optimset' and 'optimget' functions. I had thought of something like two levels --- compatibility functions which map Matlabs options to Octave options --- so that its possible to introduce a new option without fear to have to change its name later if Matlab decides to use just this name for a different thing ... This is not academic: Matlabs 'lsqcurvefit' takes bounds as direct arguments, but no general linear (or non-linear) constraints. Linear inequality constraints, however, are now offered by our 'leasqr'. So constraints would have to be passed via the 'options' argument of 'lsqcurvefit'. (And BTW I think that constraints really _belong_ into an options argument, and bounds also). But Matlabs 'optimset', which is used to prepare the 'options' argument, does not know an option for constraints. Without the two levels above, Octaves 'optimset' should always allow even unknown options to avoid the problem of synchronization between Octave and Octave Forge. Olaf ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Octave-dev mailing list Octave-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
