Plotting problem again

[John W. Eaton]

On  3-Jun-2008, Ben Abbott wrote:

| On Jun 1, 2008, at 1:45 PM, Ben Abbott wrote:
| 
| > At present, I see 3 topics/bugs/features to discuss
| >
| > (1) Is there a bug respecting "If all arguments are matrices, then  
| > each column of the matrices is treated as a separate line"?
| > (2) Is there a bug respecting the specification of linestype/color/ 
| > marker?
| > (3) Shall mixing of x/y vectors in combination with a z array be  
| > supported?
| 
| A fourth item is merited.
| 
| (4) Matlab does not support plot3(x, y + 1i*z) as equivalent to  
| plot3(x, y, z). While useful. this Octave feature makes compatibility  
| with Matlab difficult.

Why does Octave's plot3 have this special feature?

| It would appear a significant rewrite of plot3 is merited. What is the  
| preference? ... shall the corrected version attempt to be backward  
| compatible *and* respect Matlab, or it is sufficient to respect  
| Matlab's plot3?

If it is possible to keep backward compatibility without too much
effort, then I'd say do it.  Otherwise, I think compatibility is
generally more important (unless the compatible behavior is really
undesirable or could be considered a bug).

Please note that I dropped the help list from this reply.  I don't
think it is necessary to cross post this discussion.

jwe