RE: Octave and Guile?

[Daschbach, John L]

The "strong numerical library" picture is a bit over simplified with respect to
using octave in your guile based program.  Much of the core of octave is
appropriately wrapped, established numerical libraries, often Fortran ones,
(BLAS, Lapack, Lsode, ..).  But much of the power of octave (and Matlab) comes
from interpreted functions and scripts.  It is possible, and I use it often, to
create statements or scripts on the fly and evaluate them, just as you can in
scheme, lisp, perl and other interpreted languages.  John Eaton's view, which I
think is the correct but difficult one, is that to run octave in guile you will
need to be able to translate on the fly, octave code to guile and then interpret
it in guile.  While this could and probably will be in a library, it's not
exactly like a standard library, at least to me.

I think it will required a good deal of design and coding effort to accomplish
this integration.  The code for lisp based algebraic manipulation programs
(which usually use a non-lisp read syntax) might be an good place to start.
It's not the same, but in systems like Macsyma code could be written in both
Lisp and the top-level language.

I'm in favor of evaluating guile as the base for the next octave, but I think
the decision should be based on a solid assesment of the various options.  

-John


        ----------
        From:   Marius Vollmer
        Sent:   Sunday, 17 September2000 1:46 PM
        To:     John W. Eaton
        Cc:     address@hidden; address@hidden; address@hidden
        Subject:        Re: Octave and Guile?

        "John W. Eaton" <address@hidden> writes:

        > Would there be any interest within the Guile community for some sort
        > of merger of Octave and Guile?

        I would be most thrilled to see this happen.  I think Guile can be a
        great `integration platform', where separate things come together.  A
        strong numerical library like Octave should be a very important
        component for many applications.

        I could use it immediatly.  In fact, it is a major bullet on my
        wish-list for our data-stream simulator.  It is written using Guile
        and Octave would be just the thing to generate the stimuli and
        post-process the results.

        I think Octave and Guile would fit perfectly.
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