@Nicholas: Thanks for taking care of this.  I see that your changesets are getting closer to perfection.  We have some guidelines that might be useful on the Octave Wiki at https://wiki.octave.org/Contribute.  I don't know why they are buried so deeply.

One thing I saw in the commit message is that you are using full paths to files within the source tree.  We just use the file name unless there would be confusion.  So, we write

* std.m: ....

instead of

* scripts/statistics/std.m: ....

Helpful notes for commit messages are at https://wiki.octave.org/Commit_message_guidelines.

Second, the documentation has a very specific tone and is written in the active voice and present tense.  There are guidlines for the help text at https://wiki.octave.org/Help_text_style_guide.

Instead of "The function will calculate the ..." we write "Function calculates the ...".

I made these simple changes for Octave coding conventions and then got absorbed in cleaning up/optimizing std.m and var.m.  I checked everything in here if you want to take a look (http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/1bf26f913b9c).

Marking bug as Fixed and closing report.

Confirmed.  This should be a simple modification of the m-file.  Whoever makes the change should also update the Matlab Compatibility section of etc/NEWS.8.md.