Re: How does Octave shine?

[Cameron Laird]

Dr. Macy tried to post this yesterday, experienced an addressing
problem, ... well, here's what he originally intended to send:
=========================================================================
For me, advantages of octave...

1) EFFECTIVE !!
2) Relatively small, non-intrusive program & very portable
3) No irritating [and usually incomprehensible] GUI
4) Open Source makes it easy to verify EXACTLY what is
going on.  Been burnt too many times by other people's
undeclared, incorrect assumptions.
5) Extremely responsive, friendly, and most importantly,
super intelligent support group

...and one, back handed compliment:
6) "Encouraged" to "vectorize" to speed up calculations.
 However, since using octave [and want speed] am not able
to rely on the crutch of extensive for loops.  Thus, I
finally am beginning to understand matrices.

         - Robert -

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 19:57:49 +0000
 Cameron Laird <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm helping put together a presentation on the potential
> of open-source
> software in engineering situations; I'd love one or two
> or three very
> pointed examples of work Matlab effectively can't do but
> Octave makes
> easy.  Although I've used Octave occasionally over the
> last year, I'm 
> not current or expert with it.  What shows Octave off to
> best 
> advantage for a Matlab-using audience?  Is it the ODE or
> nonlinear
> algebraic solver?  Variable-length argument- and
> result-passing?  Who's
> good at Octave advocacy?