[OctDev] Functions in the core

[John W. Eaton]

On 13-Apr-2009, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| No question John is maybe the only person who
| understands the whole code of Octave

Definitely not.  At this point, I don't think I fully understand the
sparse matrix, matrix_type, indexing and slicing, or integer
arithmetic code, among other things.  I don't think it is necessary to
understand it all at once.  The key thing is that you can understand
the parts you need to understand, when you working on them.  It also
helps if the code is modular enough so that changes to one part don't
unexpectedly break other unrelated things.  Mostly I think Octave
succeeds in that regard, but there are some things that are too
complex (the operator definition macros and things like that).

jwe