extracting value from a vector

[John W. Eaton]

On 21-Apr-2009, Rob Mahurin wrote:

| Would it make sense to modify deal.m to allow this use in a less  
| cryptic way?  Here's a (partial) patch that allows the above with
| 	[a,b] = deal(v,"columns")

The deal function just copies inputs to outputs, so currently your
example will do

  octave:1> [a, b] = deal (1, "columns")
  a =  1
  b = columns

I don't think any change to examine the values of the arguments to
deal and do something special will work.

jwe