diagonal & permutation matrices

[Thorsten Meyer]

Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
> I've run into two issues:
> 
> 1. What to do when printing/saving? To honor Matlab compatibility, we
> should display & save them as full matrices. However, it is certainly
> much more informational to print them specially, and seems a little
> bit weird for Octave to cripple its own data when saving variables.
The default file format for saving is still octave's own ascii format.
Isn't that incompatible anyway? And would there be any way of saving such
special matrices in matlab's binary format without  breaking compatibility?

Does octave's display need to be compatible (or is it at the moment?)? How
would you display a diagonal or permutation matrix?

Thorsten