Re: Octave and Guile?

[Michael Vanier]

> > Octave would also likely receive a facelift to remove bad features
> > (Matlab compatibility would not be a significant goal) and to focus
> > the language on numerical capabilities only.
> 
> If Matlab still has a significant user base, I suspect you may want to
> keep Matlab compatibility.  Implementing Matlab as a Guile translator
> seems like a natural solution.

As a heavy matlab user, I'd also like to see this.  A translator for the
matlab language would be nice, but a cleaned up matlab-type language which
is internally translated to scheme would be even nicer.  The fine folks at
the Mathworks (home of matlab) apparently know nothing about proper
computer language design, so creating things as simple as arrays with more
than two dimensions or associative arrays is incredibly painful (almost
worse than creating it in C).

Believe me, matlab has a *huge* user base in scientific and industry
circles.  We (guile folks) would benefit tremendously if we had even 10% of
that user base.  BTW I wanted to use octave for my current project but
couldn't because of the lack of sparse matrix support.

Mike