Re: How does Octave shine?

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Cameron Laird wrote:

> I apologize for not writing clearly.  I'm well aware of Octave's 
> license.  I should have explained that I'm looking for *functional* 
> advantages of Octave I can tout.  I have an audience that's suspicious 
> about open-source software; once I show 'em a few technical features of 
> Octave, though, I expect to be able to make a lot of progress with them.


Octave can run scripts from the command line.  Just make this the first 
line of your script and make it executable:

#!/usr/local/bin/octave

I don't think MATLAB can do that.

There are also many more functions available for Octave than for MATLAB. 
MATLAB sells sets of functions in toolboxes, but Octave has Octave-Forge 
with loads of free functions.

When I write scientific code that I want to share, I want people to be 
able to use it.  If I write my code for MATLAB, users would have to pay 
The MathWorks before they can use my code.  If I really want to share it, 
I'll make it work in Octave so that anyone can run it.  This also means 
that code written for Octave will be more often used and cited than code 
written for MATLAB (unless it runs in Octave unchanged, and it may).

Mike