Comma-separated lists 2 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 [] (see Matrices) or the
creation of a cell array with {} (see 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.