Re: Expected behavior for variables which shadow function names

[Rik]

On 03/07/2013 10:55 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 03/07/2013 01:18 PM, Rik wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I think that in the olden times, Matlab behaved the same was as Octave in
> this case.  But now, Matlab does more checking to ensure that you are not
> using symbols as both variables and functions within the same scope, or
> that you are not trying to reuse a cleared variable as a function, etc. 
> I think the newer behavior is better.  Maybe we should fix Octave to
> perform similar checks now that compatibility with the old and relatively
> confusing behavior is no longer an issue for us.
John,

I would definitely prefer that.  Can someone verify on a recent version of
Matlab how this behaves?  If they have upgraded their behavior then we can too.

--Rik