CODEWITHSUNDEEP
warningsoctave
Zelphir Kaltstahl
Zelphir Kaltstahl

Reputation: 6189

Octave disable automatic broadcasting

I have some code which Octave spits me out many

warning: product: automatic broadcasting operation applied

I think this automatic broadcasting could be the problem in my code, which doesn't work yet, but that message is so non informative, it doesn't help me locate the problem at all. I'd rather like Octave to simply fail, error at the specific location of that broadcast, so that I can manually go there, understand why it was broadcasting there and then fix my code. Also, even if my code doesn't not work because of this mistake, but because of some other mistake, in any other programming language I'd also go there and fix it, since I don't like to rely on something automatically differently interpreted, but want to have clean code.

How do I disable that annoying behavior (generally, all the time, everywhere) and make Octave tell me where the mistake is?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1513

Answers (2)

carandraug
carandraug

Reputation: 13091

Also, even if my code doesn't not work because of this mistake, but because of some other mistake, in any other programming language I'd also go there and fix it, since I don't like to rely on something automatically differently interpreted, but want to have clean code.

The warning for automatic broadcasting was added in Octave 3.6 and has been removed in Octave 4.0. The reason for throwing a warning is that automatic broadcasting was a new feature in 3.6 that could catch users by surprise.

But it is meant to be used like a normal operator, not to be an accident. The fact that using it was throwing a warning made it sound like it was something that needs to be fixed on the code. So don't feel like it.

Newer Octave versions of Octave will not throw that warning by default. You might as well disable the warning now:

warning ("off", "Octave:broadcast");

How do I disable that annoying behaviour (generally, all the time, everywhere) and make Octave tell me where the mistake is?

You can't disable automatic broadcasting, that would make Octave stop working. It would be the equivalent of, for example, disabling addition and expect Octave to continue working normally.

You seem to think that automatic broadcasting is the source of your mistake. That cannot be. Automatic broadcasting does not cause a different result. If you were to disable automatic broadcasting you would simply get an error about nonconformant dimensions.

Therefore, assuming you never intended to make use of broadcasting, your program is not working because of some other mistake happening before automatic broadcasting (usually a function returned a row vector and you expected a column vector, or vice-versa).

However, you are obviously using an old version of Octave and at that time broadcasting was not much used yet. You can make it throw an error instead of a warning and maybe it will still work fine (specially if you don't use Octave packages because they used automatic broadcast more than Octave core). You can do this with:

warning ("error", "Octave:broadcast");

Upvotes: 4

Dimitry
Dimitry

Reputation: 2358

warning('error');

Will set all warnings to be treated as errors. For more see the documentation on that, there seems to be a way to set only specific warning as error, or maybe have it display the position, which causes the warning.

Note. All commands set octave parameters for a specific session only. There are certain files where such commands can be written so that these options become default.

Upvotes: 0

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