error in octave, _compactformat_ undefined

[latot]

Hi all, seems the option __compactformat__ was removed from octave:

octave:2> a=sym(1)
error: '__compactformat__' undefined near line 1 column 3

the problem is in the display file:

grep -r compactformat
inst/@sym/display.m:    loose = eval('! __compactformat__ ()');

at least seems only happen in this case.

Thx. Cya.

[cbm755]

what octave version is this? attach a bit of ver output. There were problems about this but I thought we'd worked it out...

[mtmiller]

In Octave's 4.3 development branch, both get(0, 'FormatSpacing') and __compactformat__ have been dropped, there is currently no way to query whether the output format is in compact mode or not.

[mtmiller]

Open upstream issue: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?46603

[latot]

Hi, Thx, for the doc!

[mtmiller]

This is fixed upstream,

http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/f84aa17075d4

The new (pre-4.4) way to query the output format is with

[fmt, spacing] = format ()
fmt =

short

spacing =

loose

Is this good enough to use here or should something better be done upstream?

There are a couple of shortcomings I see with this approach:

• nargout('format') doesn't work because it is a compiled function
• calling [a,b] = format in Octave 4.0, for example, will reset the format to defaults, and then error that the number of output arguments doesn't match

[cbm755]

Thanks everyone. @mtmiller: I think that API will be fine for us.