Colin B. Macdonald

This sounds like a nice thing to build into future CI improvements. I'd happily review such a change but I'm unsure how to start doing it myself: contributions welcome!

there is a unit test that fails because of this, that's a good place to start for debugging

todo: works with example_refine_mobius but not example_refine_grid

The cp function for the ellipse has some optimization in it so probably all values are perturbed slightly, which is probably enough to avoid the symmetry. Maybe similar things can...

FWIW, [this comment](https://github.com/cbm755/octsympy/pull/864#issuecomment-371261027) shows how to use `socat` to similar the pipes thing. No idea if this is do-able on Windows.

Ok, not so minimal but here goes: 1. Install Octave-4.2.2. Specifically, I think I used octave-4.2.2-w64-installer.exe from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/windows/ 2. Run Octave (GUI or cmd line) 3. "cd where/ever/pyexe/is/ 4. type...

> Does passing an explicit bufsize of a positive number to popen2 work? Unfortunately, I don't think I have direct control of that in Octave.

In case it matters, Its possible Octave uses its own popen2 implementation on Windows (rather than a POSIX system call). This stuff is in `oct-syscalls.cc` and `wrappers/octave-popen2.c` None of this...

#### Maple 10 (rather old) `Transpose(v) . v` gives scalar `14` where `v` is the vector `v = `. But for a matrix `m` that just happens to be that...

Personally, I think I would prefer scalar + 1x1 matrix to give a _scalar_ perhaps even that 1x1 matrices were not routinely returned to users at all. But might be...