Re: Octave in Universities

[Paul Kienzle]

On Mar 14, 2006, at 10:14 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 14-Mar-2006, kamaraju kusumanchi wrote:
>
> | I personally use matlab because of compatibility issues. Code 
> developed
> | under octave is not completely compatible with matlab.
>
> In what ways?  I think if you are careful (and it doesn't really
> require that much work) you can write code for Octave that also works
> without any changes in Matlab.  Yes, you are restricted to a subset of
> the language, but I think it is still a useful subset.
>
> | I would like to see a -matlab-compatible flag in octave. So that 
> octave
> | behaves exactly like matlab when this flag is used.
>
> So it would not allow double-quoted strings, # for comments, etc?
> Even in .m files that are distributed with Octave?  Is that really
> what you want?  And please don't even think about asking that the flag
> only apply to user code -- what would that be, and how would you decide
> what counts as user code?  More likely, Octave will continue to aim
> for compatibility plus some extensions (but as I've explained many
> times now, we have to be careful when designing extensions).

The argument for supporting this can be made for a number
of people.  E.g., students working on their own version at home
of the problem who have to hand it in to the professor who will
test it on matlab.  People collaborating with matlab users on a
project.  Toolbox writers who want to have their code run on Matlab.

Most of the work can be done by tweaking the lexer so it doesn't
handle quite so many keywords.  It would be easy enough to trigger
from a file starting with % for example.  The biggest difficulty
would be restricting the the available functions to those that are
compatible.  The other difficulty is to find someone to to do the
necessary work without making the interpreter harder to maintain.

- Paul



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