Re: Octave advocacy

[Mike Miller]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, John B. Thoo wrote:

> On Sep 16, 2004, at 10:16 PM, Mike Miller wrote:
>
> > I'll tell you one thing.  I can do things like this in Octave...
> >
> > echo 'sqrt(29)' | octave -q
>
> That's cool!  I didn't know about that.  Neat.  Thanks.


Of course, I'm working in a unix environment.  The truth is, I use a 
little script like this:

-------begin script on next line---------
#!/usr/local/bin/tcsh -f

echo "$1" | /usr/local/bin/octave -q
-------end script on previous line---------

I call the script "compute" and I put it in my path.  You might have to 
change the paths in the script, and you have to chmod to make it 
executable.

Once you have the script installed, instead of this....

echo 'sqrt(29)' | octave -q

...you can do this...

compute 'sqrt(29)'

...which is a little easier.  I think every unix system should have 
something like this for quick command line computations.  It's very handy. 
Of course, it can do a *lot* - loading data files and analyzing them using 
matrix operations, for example.

I like to call octave from scripts when I need random numbers quickly. 
Programs like gawk always give the same random numbers every time, but 
Octave uses the system clock to generate a seed.

Best,

Mike



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