built-in variables

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Jul-2009, James R. Van Zandt wrote:

| I triggered this message, ran news(), then tracked down and read NEWS,
| but found nothing relating to PS1.  As it happens, I was running
| Octave 3.2 under Cygwin, which doesn't ship the Octave 3.0 news file.

I think you should report that problem to the person responsible for
the Cygwin package.  The NEWS file is installed by "make install", so
the Cygwin package should include it.

| Your addition explains the problem, and suggests how to avoid it in
| the future, but doesn't indicate how to fix the problem in the current
| session (i.e. get rid of the variable).

?  I changed the message to

  warning: PS1 is now a function instead of a built-in variable.  By assigning to PS1, you have created a variable that hides the function PS1.  To remove the variable and restore the function, type "clear PS1"

so it does tell you to use "clear".

| and similarly for other former built-in variables.

The patch I checked in was not specific to PS1.

jwe