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SPECIAL Special Calling Syntax

Section: Functions and Scripts

# Usage

To reduce the effort to call certain functions, FreeMat supports a special calling syntax for functions that take string arguments. In particular, the three following syntaxes are equivalent, with one caveat:

       functionname('arg1','arg2',...,'argn')

or the parenthesis and commas can be removed

       functionname 'arg1' 'arg2' ... 'argn'

The quotes are also optional (providing, of course, that the argument strings have no spaces in them)

       functionname arg1 arg2 ... argn

This special syntax enables you to type `hold on` instead of the more cumbersome `hold('on')`. The caveat is that FreeMat currently only recognizes the special calling syntax as the first statement on a line of input. Thus, the following construction

      for i=1:10; plot(vec(i)); hold on; end

would not work. This limitation may be removed in a future version.

# Example

Here is a function that takes two string arguments and returns the concatenation of them.

         strcattest.m

    function strcattest(str1,str2)
      str3 = [str1,str2];
      printf('str1 = %s, str2 = %s, str3 = %s\n',str1,str2,str3);

We call `strcattest` using all three syntaxes.

    --> strcattest('hi','ho')
    str1 = hi, str2 = ho, str3 = hiho
    --> strcattest 'hi' 'ho'
    str1 = hi, str2 = ho, str3 = hiho
    --> strcattest hi ho
    str1 = hi, str2 = ho, str3 = hiho