Dave Ciochetto

Jos's comment about computing vernum will work on any MATLAB that has struct's. However, the whole point of a function like this is that it must work on very old MATLAB releases, including very old MATLAB's that do not have structs.

I think the .Version field returned from ver might be a string of the form 'A.B.C', in which case Jos' suggestion will fail completely.

In any case, "ver" is about 100 times slower than "version" (try it), an important consideration if this code is called inside a heavily-called function. That critique applies to the new "verLessThan" function in MATLAB, too, by the way.

So a well-written code, like this, must not use "ver".

The "version" function is likely to exist on much older MATLAB releases than "ver", since the former does not use structs.

The real question, though is this: will this code work on MATLAB 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...? How far back has it been tested?

I rate it a 4 because the code should be cleaned up a bit, the comments ("see also", for example) are lacking, and (mostly) because it isn't clear from the documentation how far back the code has been tested. It would also be nice to be able to distinguish between 7.0.1 and 7.0.4.

I have to strongly disagree with Sergei's comment. The real usefulness of this code is that it can (or at least should) be written *very* carefully so that it will run on, say, MATLAB 3. Assuming that has been done, that makes this code useful for those of us who no longer have a copy of MATLAB 3.

Getting these 2 lines right is *not* a trivial thing, as Sergei claims it to be.

Obsolete now. Use ellipse.m