Johannes Kissel

I was looking for something like this. thanks.

Duane,

I think you didn't get the point. vercmp.m is a tool which compares two version numbers produced by ANY software. Comparing Matlab version numbers is a different kettle of fish.

Thomas

To the author - You may know what this code does and how to use it. But without help, nobody else will. Would you throw your newborn child out into the streets unclothed and uneducated? This is effectively what you have done here.

As for the lack of posted standards, this is true, but I hope to see that change. You may post code as you see fit. However you must also recognize that we as reviewers will then see fit to provide unflattering reviews.

Think about how someone willl use your code. There is absolutely no indication what it expects as arguments. I had to read through the code even to decide if I agreed with how it defines an "empty" struct. If you do edit the code, it uses varargin. What & how many arguments will it use or need? What will it return? No hints are given. In effect, your response suggests that anyone who might be interested in using this code must download it, and then waste their time trying to decrypt your code to decide what it does. In my experience, matlab is simple enough to program in that its often far easier to write a tool from scratch than it is to decypher what badly written and documented code does, and then figure out how to use it.

As for David's question, there are vast numbers of tools on the file exchange. Those who wish to find something must sort through much stuff that is effectively of little or no value to them. Reviews provide a facility to decide what is worth a second look. If an author chooses to upload file after file that has no comments, no error checking, code that is buggy and untested, then sadly, yes, I'd rather that author just gives up. Especially if they do so despite poor reviews. All that individual will do is give other users the wrong idea of what good code should look like. Since education is an important part of the file exchange, this is a problem.

On the other hand, authors that improve their submissions, uploading cleaned up versions will get good reviews from me. I'll return to a submission to which I've given a poor review to see if the author has improved it. I'm especially happy to see authors learn to improve their tools and then improve their other codes on the FEX. This means they have learned something.

You may feel that what is here on the file exchange is "as is" code. But it is also an opportunity for novices to learn about programming in matlab. Many novices might go on to work in Matlab or other languages on a profesional basis. So this is an opportunity to learn good programming practices.

As for the code in this submission itself, it can be replaced by a simple one-liner:

A.a = [];
A.B = '';

all(structfun(@isempty,A))
ans =
     1

Finally, my rating for this tool might have been somewhere between a 1 and 2. While I saw no apparent bugs, its also a simple code that lacks any help at all and can be written in one line. This convinces me to call it a 1.