Re: The future of Octave

[David Doolin]

On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Andy Adler wrote:

> On Thursday, December 07, 2000 2:30 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> > I've now worked on Octave for almost nine years.  During most of that
> > time, I have enjoyed the challenge of working on a relatively large
> > project.
> 
> I think the first thing to be said is a big _congratulations_

Absolutely!
[]
> 
> In order to do this, however, much needs to be done:
> 
[]
> 1. The "communitity" needs to come to a clear consensus about
>    the goals of future development.
> 
>    How important is Matlab compatability?

I personally think it is critical.  There, I said it.  It's
an opinion, and I will not argue about it, so save your 
breathe.  ;)

Either octave should try and maintain ("full") compatibility, or  
jettison the effort, burn the bridge and don't look back.
(By "full", I mean some useful core subset of the matlab language
and function library.  I do not mean implementing guide, 
simulink, etc.)  
 
> 
>    There are now various contributions that exist all
>    over the net.  How easily should these be added to the
>    source base?
> 
>    Should octave have additional "non-numeric" features to
>    support all sorts of generic scripting language features?

What I really need is high level scripting type langauge like 
octave that compile into blazingly fast native code...
Don't we all.

[]
 
> 
> 3. Where will octave be hosted? Where will FAQs, mailing lists,
>    etc. be kept.

Some of us threw some money at obtaining octave.org.  I will 
throw some money at getting it hosted if necessary.

I have lots more opinions, but I will save them until next year.
Hopefully I will have a nice academic position and can throw
a few pennies toward octave development.  

Back to lurk mode.

Dave D



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