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<p>Hello,<br>
<br>
Scilab 6.0 is released. With respect to previous major releases,
the storage and management of variables have been completely
changed. This was one of the major purposes for this release.<br>
</p>
<p>Yet, after 30 years of development of this high level software,
we are still unable to protect any user variable against clearing,
and there are no news on this side. There are many oitlying
developments, whereas this central feature is still unavailable.
The pseudo function predef() is still here, alone, never ever
actually usable.</p>
<p>Indeed, predef() is unable to protect variables one by one, at
any moment after the session startup. As its name states it,
predef() has been designed exclusively to protect <b>predef</b>ined
variables %i, %pi, etc during the startup process. It is a startup
<b>internal</b>, and we could wonder why it has been documented.</p>
<p>One of the most disturbing and buggy consequences of this missing
feature is that it is still impossible to protect a library that
has been loaded during the session, i.e. not autoloaded at
startup. Any <i>clear</i> instruction -- so loved by many former
Matlabers in their scripts -- kills all such libraries.</p>
<p>The need for a true customizable function to protect/unprotect
variables was reported as soon as 2004 -- and likely even before
--, so 13 years ago. For the only bugzilla reports, please see for
instance:<br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://bugzilla.scilab.org/686">http://bugzilla.scilab.org/686</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://bugzilla.scilab.org/8634">http://bugzilla.scilab.org/8634</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://bugzilla.scilab.org/10988">http://bugzilla.scilab.org/10988</a><br>
</p>
<p>Scilab has still some central weaknesses like this one.<br>
IMO, implementing varprot() should be a top priority.</p>
<p>Don't you need this feature as well?</p>
Best regards<br>
<p> Samuel Gougeon<br>
<br>
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