field ordering in octave's save/load

[John W. Eaton]

On  3-Mar-2009, Gunnar Rätsch wrote:

| I've been using octave a lot recently and am really happy with its  
| recent progress. Thanks a lot for your efforts!

If you want to see Octave continue to improve, then please consider
contributing to the project in some way.

| I came across one issue today, which isn't really a bug, but just a  
| different behaviour compared to matlab, which you may want to fix (at  
| least it would help me quite a bit).
| I've noticed that when structures are saved and then loaded again in  
| octave, then the fields are alphabetically sorted. This is not the  
| case in matlab.
| I had a piece of code that depended on the ordering of these fields  
| and therefore the octave code failed, while the matlab code worked  
| just fine (this was a difficult-to-find bug).
| 
| What do you think? Do you intend to change the code such that the  
| field order is preserved?

I checked in the following change.  Note that it does not solve the
problem for HDF format files.  I don't know what the proper fix is for
that.

  http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/5a956c026b6c

jwe