Re: Support for N-dimensional arrays almost done

[Oliver Heimlich]

Hi Joel,

On 20.07.2017 17:37, Joel Dahne wrote:
> I have almost finished the support for N-dimensional arrays in the
> interval package. On my blog post last week [1] I wrote about the
> current status. Since then I have also updated the coding style for all
> m-files that were left.

> [1] https://gsocinterval.blogspot.se/2017/07/ahead-of-timeline.html

thank you very much for your great work so far.  It's hard for me to
keep pace with reviewing and merging your changes.  Fortunately, this
doesn't spoil your progress.  ;-)


Some small hints on your latest changes:

The last two examples in [2] should be reformatted in texinfo style: The
input lines need no prompt (>), and the result lines should be marked
with @result{}.

You disabled a doctest [3] in the manual.  It used to work in doctest
0.4.1, but no longer works in doctest 0.5.0.  The cause is: texinfo
examples without any output no longer get executed by default.  So,
doctest skips the first example block.  Consequently, the second block
fails.  It can be fixed with the following directive:

@c doctest: -TEXINFO_SKIP_BLOCKS_WO_OUTPUT


Regarding the unit tests: I'll put a little bit more work into the
Makefile and add complete support for the new ITF1788 test data during
all make targets, e. g., “make run”.  The aim is that we can eventually
get rid of the generated test/*.tst files (or
build/octave/native/interval/*.tst files in the package development
workspace).  For the user it makes package testing more straight forward
since you can simply test the function that you want to test and don't
have to execute an extra test suite.  If you want, you can spread use of
itl.mat among the other methods and add ND array test by reshaping the
test data.


Regarding bonus topics that you could follow after having finished the
work on ND arrays:

 - Improve plotting [4] by adding support for more functions (plotyy,
semilogx/y, loglog, and others that make sense) or by adding support for
plotting options (line style, marker style, …).

 - Implement new interval arithmetic functions (some rough ideas in the
wiki [5]).

 - Also I like your idea to work on Taylor arithmetic, since it is
closely related.


Best
Oliver


[2]
https://sourceforge.net/u/urathai/octave/ci/76431745772f12936e11f8f7b8329eab98c53b62/

[3]
https://sourceforge.net/u/urathai/octave/ci/c078807c6b32142a96e3441a4bea474aebaa23bd/

[4]
https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/High_002dLevel-Plotting.html

[5] http://wiki.octave.org/Interval_package#Development_status