I modified the patch a bit.  The m-files had CRLF endings so I stripped those down to just LF.  I also added some BIST tests to validate the inputs.  Thanks a lot for doing heavy lifting on this task.

Marking as fixed and closing report.

x y and z ticklabel functions zipped and attached, along with tweaked versions of the others. will put a patch up shortly once I make the doc file edits.

(file #41694)

ahh, ok.  I think I tried get(gca) on a polar plot and just saw the xtick and ytick definitions. I didn't scroll up far enough to see that it did add an rtick and ttick.

I doubt there's any issue if octave's rtick and thetatick don't produce errors for a polar() plot. Matlab errors for calling rtick on a cartesian axis, including polar(). similarly, xtick errors calling on a polarplot() but not on a polar. 

assuming we eventually make a compatible polaraxes object, the only issue is that matlab calls their axis property thetatick instead of ttick. should be able to have the wrapper check for and return either.

does octave have any current implementation of a plotting function that would use the r and theta tick functions?

appears along with 2016b came a few new ways of getting and setting axis properties.

xticks
yticks
zticks
rticks
thetaticks
xticklabels
yticklabels
zticklabels
thetaticklabels
rticklabels

it appears from the documentation that each function without argument would simply act as get(gca,'xticks'), etc., so an alias for nargin=0 should be easy enough to make as a set of wrappers, at least for x, y and z. polar still describes the axis with cartesian coordinates, and we don't seem to have polarplot implemented yet which uses r and theta axes.  using r and thetaticks on 'polar' gives an error about 'rticks is not supported for Cartesian axes. use xticks instead', and similar when calling xticks on a plot created polarplot.

each of the above do take a number of arguments that will either modify the 'get' or will perform a 'set' for the particular element.  documentation below:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/xticks.html