Basic questions regarding liboctave and dynamic function development

[Joshua Rigler]

Keeping in mind that I am fairly fluent in C, but know virtually nothing
about object oriented programming or C++, please forgive my ignorance...

1) What exactly is liboctave (for what, and how is it used)? How do I
interpret the documentation for liboctave found in liboctave.ps? (part
of the Octave distribution docs)  

2) Is liboctave.ps supposed to describe all functions that should be
available to me when I write .oct functions? (It doesn't...for example I
have no idea what the function "matrix_value" does (found in lu.cc), the
docs for liboctave say nothing about it, and I see no explanation in the
header file or source code).

3) Any suggestions for how somebody who understands C, but has no
object-oriented programming experience, and only a basic understanding
of C++ syntax can figure out how to write some .oct functions to make
calls to a C library?  Is there a trick to including a C header file in
a C++ program?

I won't go so far as to ask for a basics of C++ lesson, but if anyone
could help me get just a rudimentary understanding of how things work in
Octave, I should be able to put together a nice CDF I/O package for
Octave fairly quickly.

Thanks,

-EJR



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------