Thank you 🙂

@jwe, shall I push your cset with my modification?  Or is further work necessary?

I'm attaching a patch for the originally reported issue of the size function not allowing multiple dimensions to be queried at once.  Would someone like to look at adding a set of tests for this new feature?  If that turns up additional problems, I'll try to fix and then commit a changeset.

(file #51959)

Should we merge these bug reports or keep this one just about the size function?

The problem with size should be easy to fix since it is just about reporting some info that is easily accessible.

It will be somewhat harder to fix the other functions that now accept vectors of dimensions because we have to do computations over all the listed dimensions.

Still changing this back to a feature request since it is a new feature.

in addition to size, this change apparently affects other functions as well.

looking through release notes going back to 2018:
https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/release-notes.html

2018b

Vector Dimension Argument: Operate on multiple dimensions at a time for selected reduction functions
These functions now accept a vector dimension argument to specify multiple operating dimensions at a time, as well as the option 'all' to specify all dimensions of an array.

all        min
any        mode
bounds        prod
max        std
mean        sum
median        var

2019b

You can now use a vector dimension argument to query multiple array dimension lengths at a time with the size function.

A quick google search for vecdim shows it also applies to many other functions (zscore, range, quantile, skewness, etc...) but unsure if this is the same implementation as for the ones above.

The `size` function can be called in new ways since Matlab R2019b:

> Starting in R2019b, you can also specify dim as a vector of positive integers to query multiple dimension lengths at a time. For example, size(A,[2 3]) returns the lengths of the second and third dimensions of A in the 1-by-2 row vector szdim.

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

sz = size(A)
szdim = size(A,dim)
szdim = size(A,dim1,dim2,…,dimN)
[sz1,...,szN] = size(___)

This change seems reasonable to me and mostly backward compatible.

Non-existing dimensions get filled up with "1"s, as the example illustates:

>> A = eye (3);
>> size (A, 4,2,3,1)

ans =

     1     3     1     3

>> size (A, [4,2,3,1])

ans =

     1     3     1     3

However this is a very elementary function and Octave should adapt soon.