Symbolic routine sym

[Donald MacKinnon]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> On  6-Mar-2009, Donald MacKinnon wrote:
> 
> | I'm having a problem with a the symbolic routine sym(). x=sym('x') works 
> | fine.
> | 
> | An application I've found uses the routine sym('','real'). It is not 
> | clear if they're using Octave or Matlab.
> | 
> | Octave expects a single argument and fails with:
> | "single error: one argument expected"
> | 
> | Using a single agreement then causes a routine at a lower level to fail 
> | with:
> | 
> | "error: can't perform indexed assignment for ex type
> | error: assignment failed, or no method for `ex = ex'"
> | 
> | It could be that the function sym() in Matlab say was compiled as an 
> | overloaded function. (a guess)
> | 
> | If anyone knows of a work around I'd be pleased to try it out.
> | I'm running Mandriva 2009.0 with all updates executed.
> 
> The symbolic package is external package, not part of the core Octave
> distribution.  My suggestion is to report the problem to the
> maintainers of the symbolic package, or contribute the changes for the
> functionality you need.
> 
> jwe

Thank you for the suggestion John. As far as I can gather the 
"maintainer" is "the Octave community".

The routine "sym" is in a shared library with The title
"x86_64-mandriva-linux-gnu-api-v32/symbols.oct". I would guess that this
is beyond my reach.
I think I know what is required but I'm not certain. I think "sym" 
requires an additional calling argument of type String, eg ('x','real')

Thank you again for your suggestion.

Regards, Donald