[11352] in Athena Bugs
rsaix 7.6H: matlab
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (mkgray@MIT.EDU)
Tue Nov 9 03:36:30 1993
From: mkgray@MIT.EDU
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 93 03:36:08 EST
System name: oliver
Type and version: POWER 7.6H
Display type: colorgda
What were you trying to do?
Make a histogram with 400,000 bins
What's wrong:
It crashed.
What should have happened:
It should not have done that. It should have given me a pretty graph
with 400,000 bins. It should do what I say. It's 3:30 in the morning and
I'm sick of doing Junior Lab and matlab should do what I tell it to. If I want
400,000 bins, it should give it to me. What would have happened if I hadn't
saved my data and it had died and I had lost hours of work? I would not
have been happy.
At a bare minimum, it should have said:
>> hist(data,400000)
??? Are you crazy? You don't need that many bins.
>>
But instead, it crashed. That sucks.
Please describe any relevant documentation references:
>> help hist
HIST Plot histograms.
HIST(Y) plots a histogram with 10 equally spaced bins between
the minimum and maximum values in Y, showing the distribution
of the elements in vector Y.
HIST(Y,N), where N is a scalar, uses N bins.
HIST(Y,X), where X is a vector, draws a histogram using the
bins specified in X.
[N,X] = HIST(...) does not draw a graph, but returns vectors
X and N such that BAR(X,N) is the histogram.
See also BAR.
Notice, it says "uses N bins." and it says "N is a scalar". 400,000 is a
scalar. The help entry doesn't say "N is a scalar less than 400,000".
It should let me make a histogram with a million bins. Being MIT students
we need powerful features like the ability to histogram millions of points
into millions of bins. A few tens of thousands of bins is just not enough.
Maybe at Harvard, a few thousand is enough, but this is MIT.
Thank you for your time.
