Commands (GNU Octave)

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### 11.12 Commands

Commands are a special class of functions that only accept string input arguments. A command can be called as an ordinary function, but it can also be called without the parentheses. For example,

    my_command hello world

is equivalent to

    my_command ("hello", "world")

The general form of a command call is

    cmdname arg1 arg2 …

which translates directly to

    cmdname ("arg1", "arg2", …)

Any regular function can be used as a command if it accepts string input arguments. For example:

    toupper lower_case_arg
       ⇒ ans = LOWER_CASE_ARG

One difficulty of commands occurs when one of the string input arguments is stored in a variable. Because Octave can’t tell the difference between a variable name and an ordinary string, it is not possible to pass a variable as input to a command. In such a situation a command must be called as a function. For example:

    strvar = "hello world";
    toupper strvar
       ⇒ ans = STRVAR
    toupper (strvar)
       ⇒ ans = HELLO WORLD