[changeset] Re: if 1 | nonsense 'hello', end

[Thorsten Meyer]

Hi,

John W. Eaton wrote:
> |  - how much attention do I need to pay not to cite the matlab
> | documentation literally within the octave help strings (from a legal
> | point of view)?
>
> What do you mean by "cite the matlab documentation literally"?  You
> should definitely not be copying (even if you modify the wording) any
> Matlab documentation.
>   
Sorry, my wording wasn't very clear. Of course I do not want to copy
matlab documentation.  However, in this case for example, I read the
matlab documentation strings of the logical operators (cited up in this
thread) shortly before I rewrote the corresponding strings in octave and
I had to make a conscious effort not to just use the same words. Then I
imagined writing documentation for a function that came into octave
mainly for compatibility reasons. In this case it would seem natural to
me to look into the matlab documentation to find out what the function
is supposed to do. Then, when writing my own version, I imagined how
some of the formulations from matlab might stick in my memory and thus
end up in the octave documentation.

So my question is rather: should I avoid reading the matlab
documentation of something I would like to document in octave? Or should
I even crosscheck for unintended similarities after writing something?

regards

Thorsten