deprecated functions

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-Mar-2009, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| I don't think we should copy Matlab's defects, and what you suggest is
| of course sensible. The only reason I didn't do it when I was creating
| diagonal matrices was the compatibility issue. I have a strong feeling
| that we should do something like a ballot.
| 
| As for the work, I'd like to kindly ask you to first share your plans.
| You see, actually enabling the behavior you ask for is almost as easy
| as changing the default conversion of diagonal matrices to sparse
| ones, then I think just about everything will immediatelly work
| correctly, though not as efficiently as it could.
| We should certainly specialize diag * sparse and diag \ sparse, and
| probably also diag + sparse and diag - sparse (because we do so for
| dense matrices), but it can, and should, be done incrementally.
| 
| I would like to reuse as much code as reasonably possible here.

Either way, this seems like a fairly significant and risky change, so
I would prefer to do it after 3.2.

jwe