octave + shell escape

[Daniel Heiserer]

Hi,
I am completely new user of octave, though its perhaps too early asking
questions concerning octave until I know it better. But never the less I
know matlab very well and octave is a free tool trying to be almost
matlab compatible with lots of enhancement

I am using Linux and want to port octave to SGI/IBM/Cray. 
Here are my first questions:

1) I am missing the sparse matrices a lot. I have seen that there are
people working on that. Does anybody know when it might be realized. Can
i help ? (my C++ knowledge is poor, C is better).

2) I also miss the shell escape functions of matlab. I have lots of
m-files in matlab using this feature. It concerns the matlab commands

"! string to execute on operating system" at the beginning of a line.
(like in gnuplot)
"unix('string to execute on operating system')"
I think its not a big problem to implement that. Perhaps it is already
implemented and I didn't find. Can i help ?

3) The replot functionality. When I set the "xlabel('foo')" it doesn't
appear in the plot. It appears only when I plot the plot again. That
means gnuplot should replot the figure each time a "xlabel|ylabel|title"
command or something like that is typed.


Thanks for that great piece of free software. Don't bother telling me
what I can do to enhance the development.

Bye
                                 Daniel Heiserer