Re: exist, configure, doc2tex and \index

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Petr Mikulik wrote:
>>>2. Gnuplot supports both exists('a') and exist('a'), but documents
>>>only one of them. As it was me who made this confusion, I would
>>>propose to keep only exist('a').
>>
>>I would rather allow the extra 's' since it is more natural in
>>English.  Do you really care about 1 extra character in the source code?
> 
> 
> I see votes for exists('a'). Thus exist('a') could be removed or be 
> documented in gnuplot.doc (functions do not allow abbreviations).
> 
> Further:
> gnuplot> print words(4)
>           internal error : non-STRING argument
> 
> gnuplot> print exists(4)
> 0
> 
> 
> Shouldn't we expect the same error message?
> (and "internal error: ...", not "... error : ...")

Yes, on both accounts.  Otherwise one gets the following results:

gnuplot> print exists(alpha)
         undefined variable: alpha

gnuplot> print exists("alpha")
0
gnuplot> alpha = 5
gnuplot> print exists(alpha)
0
gnuplot> print exists("alpha")
1

The third example of "exists" above is slightly misleading.  Forcing the string error message will avoid any such confusion.

Is this 4.2 critical, Ethan?  Otherwise, we can create a bug report and come back to it.

Dan