I pushed the cset here (http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/23a610a3f001) after adding a Compatibility Note about the problem with nested functions.

Odd.  I'm sure I got some output previously.  I'll see if the behaviour of is_nested_function has changed, or if I'm just imagining things.

I tried to test this but I always get an empty cell array.

The test function I used is shown below.

function tst_lfun

  list = localfunctions ()
  function b
    x = 1;
  end
  y = 1;

end

function c
  z = 1;

  function d
    w = 2;
  end

end

I also tried using the debugger and stepping through line 3 but the value of list is always empty.  Something is happening, because the size of the empty cell array is 0x1 rather than 0x0.

I agree with Mike.  This cset can be committed as soon as it is complete with a reference in the documentation and a mention in the NEWS file.

I've started implementing a unit testing framework compatible with the one from MATLAB and, thanks to localfunctions(), I've made good progress. One missing feature from Octave is import() when dealing with +packages (I couldn't find a bug report requesting this feature). Would there be interest to have such a framework available in Octave or would it be redundant with the one already available (%!test)?
From what I can see, your patches are ready to be submitted. Many thanks, Lachlan!

AFAICS localfunctions() (the latest version) works fine.

I haven't looked at the unimplemented list patch yet.

Many thanks, Lachlan!

It seems to work as expected. I would remove the nargout conditionals and always return a cell array (for compatibility with MATLAB) - ie no text output.

It just displays the output cell array as 'ans'; I guess it means that it should not be listed in the help text then.

I also notice that functiontests() does not appear in the list of unimplemented functions in Octave:

http://uk.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/functiontests.html

Thanks, Lachlan. Here is an attempt at writing the help text:

## -*- texinfo -*-
## @deftypefn  {} {} localfunctions ()
## @deftypefnx {} {@var{local_functions} =} localfunctions ()
## Return a list of all local functions accessible from a function.
##
## Return value @var{local_functions} is a cell array of function handles of all
## local functions accessible from the function from which @code{localfunctions}
## is called.
##
## If called from the command line, an anonymous function, or a script,
## @var{local_functions} is an empty cell array.
##
## @seealso{functiontests}
## @end deftypefn

The function localfunctions() is not yet implemented in Octave:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/localfunctions.html

I don't think there is a way to implement this as M-code. How difficult would it be to retrieve the list of local functions from the parsing of a file?

This would contribute to build a library compatible with MATLAB's testing framework:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab-unit-test-framework.html