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[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #62839] Missing function "why" that returns ra


From: Nicholas Jankowski
Subject: [Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #62839] Missing function "why" that returns random sentence
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2022 10:18:01 -0400 (EDT)

Follow-up Comment #6, bug #62839 (project octave):

yes, very good point Markus.  we did add that prominently to the contribute
page, but it can't be stressed enough.

turns out there are a handful of these 'easter eggs'. some can be found at:
https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/2001-what-matlab-easter-eggs-do-you-know

regarding `why`, looking at what can be gleaned from the help text:


>> help why
 why    Provides succinct answers to almost any question.
    why, by itself, provides a random answer.
    why(N) provides the N-th answer.
    Please embellish or modify this function to suit your own tastes.


again, even though matlab is inviting users to open up and modify the function
with their own text,  DON'T.

It accepts N from 0 to 2^32-1. negative, noninteger, or larger than that
produces a rng error.  So N it would seem seeds a random number generator, and
isn't really indicative of the number of stored responses, but the same seed
produces repeatable output.

I think for something like this, even though it would be trivial, I would be
cencerned if Octave's version was just a copied list of the outputs of
Matlab's command. It would fall too much in the copyright gray area for my
liking.


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