Re: Octave advocacy

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2004 at 11:29:32AM -0500, NZG wrote:
> Indeed some kind of symbolic math plugin would be a very nice addition to the 
> distro's as well.
> I use Debian, so octave-forge was easy, but getting a good symbolic plugin 
> has 
> proved a little tricky.
> Any suggestions?

If you installed Debian's octave-forge, you have GiNaC support providing a
symbolic plugin. If you compiled octave-forge yourself, you'd also get it if
and only if you have the ginac-dev package installed.

AFAIK that is the only available symbolic plugin.

Hth, Dirk


> 
> NZG.
> 
> On Friday 17 September 2004 11:14 am, Quentin Spencer wrote:
> > A lot of people have responded to this, but I would like to add just one
> > more thing. Given the frequency of questions on this list that are
> > answered by "try function x in octave-forge", I think not enough people
> > are aware of octave-forge and other add-ons, which add a large number of
> > additional capabilities. Octave is far more useful to me with
> > octave-forge and I suspect this is the case for many others on this list
> > as well. Perhaps we need a little "octave-forge advocacy"? One problem I
> > see is the RPM-based Linux distributions generally include octave but
> > not octave-forge (Debian users don't have this problem thanks to Dirk).
> > It would be nice to get octave-forge included in more distributions.
> >
> > --Quentin
> >
> > John W. Eaton wrote:
> > >The following message was posted to sci.math.num-analysis today.
> > >
> > >  From: rif <address@hidden>
> > >  Subject: Re: best software environment for numerical analysis
> > >  Newsgroups: sci.math.num-analysis
> > >  Date: 16 Sep 2004 14:42:23 -0400
> > >  Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
> > >
> > >
> > >  I prefer R, which is the successor of S.  It's free (beer and
> > >  freedom), has much better graphics than Octave, has a good high-level
> > >  control language, and has a huge array of software available.  It was
> > >  designed with statistics in mind, but is extremely useful for a wide
> > >  range of numerical tasks.  (IMO, the only time Octave is really a good
> > >  choice is if you have to run existing Matlab, and even then, it rarely
> > >  works, as Octave is missing many of Matlab's features.)
> > >
> > >  Cheers,
> > >
> > >  rif
> > >
> > >
> > >Would some Octave users like to counter this?  Presumably some people
> > >on this list find that Octave works a bit more than "rarely".
> > >
> > >Thanks,
> > >
> > >jwe
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >-------------------------------------------------------------
> > >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
> > >-------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------------
> > 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
> > -------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> 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
> -------------------------------------------------------------

-- 
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
                                                -- Groucho Marx



-------------------------------------------------------------
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
-------------------------------------------------------------