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+## Copyright (C) 2004 David Bateman & Andy Adler
+##
+## This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
+## it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+## the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
+## (at your option) any later version.
+##
+## This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
+## but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
+## GNU General Public License for more details.
+##
+## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
+## along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
+## Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA
+
+## -*- texinfo -*-
+## @deftypefn {Function File} {@var{s} =} spalloc (@var{r}, @var{c}, @var{nz})
+## Returns an empty sparse matrix of size @var{r}-by-@var{c}. As Octave
+## resizes sparse matrices at the first opportunity, so that no additional 
+## space is needed, the argument @var{nz} is ignored. This function is 
+## provided only for compatiability reasons.
+##
+## It should be noted that this means that code like
+##
+## @example
+## k = 5;
+## nz = r * k;
+## s = spalloc (r, c, nz)
+## for j = 1:c
+##   idx = randperm (r);
+##   s (:, j) = [zeros(r - k, 1); rand(k, 1)] (idx);
+## endfor
+## @end example
+##
+## will reallocate memory at each step. It is therefore vitally important
+## that code like this is vectorized as much as possible.
+## @end deftypefn
+## @seealso{sparse, nzmax}
+
+function s = spalloc (r, c, nz)
+  s = sparse (r, c);
+endfunction