Wed 16 Mar 2011 04:41:02 PM UTC, comment #3:
I understand that this would be a nice feature to have, but it would also limit future additions to Octave load/save functionality.
By example, Microsoft Word can save in either .doc or .docx format. The old .doc files can be read by any version of Word, but only later versions of Word can use the extra features in the .docx format. This is the same situation that Octave has, although we didn't rename the file extension.
I checked your file and when saved in Octave text format under 3.2 it correctly loads under 3.4. Thus, 3.4 is backwards compatible with older versions of Octave which is critically important for maintaining access to legacy data. However, to be able to take advantage of some new features (such as range compression) you will need a recent version of Octave.
Incidentally, Matlab got into the same issue which is why there are -v4, -v6, and -v7 flags for loading Matlab data files.
This bug won't be fixed, but the report will be left in place for users who may stumble upon this issue.
Suggested workarounds
1) Upgrade all collaborating users to the same version of Octave.
2) Use a specified file format, such as -v7 or -hdf5, for sharing files between different versions of Octave.
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