Expected behavior for variables which shadow function names

[Rik]

3/7/13

All,

I ran across an odd behavior and I wanted to know what other people thought
was "correct".

For the following function:

function y = tstflag (flag)
  y = flag;
endfunction

When called with any argument it behaves as expected.

x = tstflag (1)
x =  1
x = tstflag ([])
x = [](0x0)

When called with no arguments, however, the return value is expanded to the
output of the flag() function which is a 64x3 matrix.

x = tstflag ()
x =

   1   0   0
   1   1   1
   0   0   1
   0   0   0
   ...

I understand what is happening, either the flag() function is shadowed by
the local variable or it isn't, but I wonder what Matlab does for this
corner case?  I naively assumed that no input would be similar to a null
input ([]).  I can always get around this by assigning a default value to
flag in the function header.


--Rik