(octave.info)Comma Separated Lists

---

Prev: Cell Arrays Up: Data Containers

---

Enter node , (file) or (file)node

6.4 Comma Separated Lists
=========================

Comma separated lists (1) are the basic argument type to all Octave
functions - both for input and return arguments.  In the example

     max (A, B)

‘A, B’ is a comma separated list.  Comma separated lists can appear on
both the right and left hand side of an assignment.  For example

     x = [1 0 1 0 0 1 1; 0 0 0 0 0 0 7];
     [I, J] = find (X, 2, "last");

Here, ‘X, 2, "last"’ is a comma separated list constituting the input
arguments of ‘find’.  ‘find’ returns a comma separated list of output
arguments which is assigned element by element to the comma separated
list ‘I, J’.

   Another example of where comma separated lists are used is in the
creation of a new array with ‘[]’ (Note: Matrices) or the creation of
a cell array with ‘{}’ (Note: Basic Usage of Cell Arrays).  In the
expressions

     a = [1, 2, 3, 4];
     c = {4, 5, 6, 7};

both ‘1, 2, 3, 4’ and ‘4, 5, 6, 7’ are comma separated lists.

   Comma separated lists cannot be directly manipulated by the user.
However, both structure arrays and cell arrays can be converted into
comma separated lists, and thus used in place of explicitly written
comma separated lists.  This feature is useful in many ways, as will be
shown in the following subsections.

Comma Separated Lists Generated from Cell Arrays

Comma Separated Lists Generated from Structure Arrays

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) Comma-separated lists are also sometimes informally referred to
as “cs-lists”.