Parse error when defining a cell array

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Dec-2008, Jan Albersmeyer wrote:

| Bug report for Octave 3.0.1 configured for i686-pc-linux-gnu
| 
| Description:
| -----------
|  
| It seems that the call to the "eye" function is not handled correctly
| while defining a cell array.
| 
| 
| Repeat-By:
| ---------
| 
| This is how I would expect Octave to work, and in this case it does fine.
| 
| octave:1> e = { 0, eye(5) }
| e =
| 
| {
|   [1,1] = 0
|   [1,2] =
| 
|      1   0   0   0   0
|      0   1   0   0   0
|      0   0   1   0   0
|      0   0   0   1   0
|      0   0   0   0   1
| 
| }
| 
| Here, a whitespace is inserted between eye and its argument, leading to
| irritating results:
| 
| octave:2> e = { 0, eye (5) }
| e =
| 
| {
|   [1,1] = 0
|   [1,2] =  1
|   [1,3] =  5
| }
| 
| When used the call "standalone", Octave does not care about the whitespace:
| 
| octave:3> e = eye (5)
| e =
| 
|    1   0   0   0   0
|    0   1   0   0   0
|    0   0   1   0   0
|    0   0   0   1   0
|    0   0   0   0   1

This behavior is intentional, for compatibility with the other leading
brand.  It is documented in the "Matrices" section of the Octave
manual.  I suppose there should also be some mention of this in the
seciton on cell arrays since similar rules about whitespace apply for
cell arrays and matrices.

jwe