Re: GNU Octave is "the GNU counterpart of Matlab" but above all Gnu Octave is Gnu Octave!!!

[antonio palestrini]

Good morning Steve,
thank you for your references. It seems that the
gnu project in the early 90s  was working to an other kernel
project  when Linus Torvalds submitted unexpectedly its one to the community.
Reading Richard Stallman at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
It seems also that Gnu and Linux is a temporarily marriage .. they are working
on a different unix-like kernel hurd.
To return to the discussion it seems to me strange that speaking about
Gnu we make
refined academic debate (and this is fine)  and  speaking about Octave
we are happy we the "clone definition". I confess that "Gnu
counterpart of Matlab" is also not very precise like for example "a
Matlab-like environment". The best definition is the John's one "a
free implementation of the Matlab language" or similarly to the
R/S-plus case "Octave is a language and environment for technical
computing. It is a GNU supported project which is similar to the
Matlab language and environment". I like these solutions very very
more than a "Matlab clone".
What I'm trying to do is a compromise solution between the John's
definition and the desire of many people to have an opensouce version
of matlab as correctly noted by John

> Also, and this is more important (to me, anyway): Octave was not
> originally conceived as a Matlab clone (and I have never called it
> that) but it turns out that most users seem to want Octave to be as
> compatible as possible with Matlab, so they can run their programs
> without having to change their code.  The result is that over the last
> several years Octave has been moving more and more in the direction of
> compatibility.  But I would still prefer it if people did not call
> Octave a Matlab "clone".

Choose whatever definition you prefer but please not "a Matlab clone"!!!

Regards
antonio

2007/2/2, Steve C. Thompson <address@hidden>:
> On Fri, 2007-02-02 at 02:52 +0100, antonio palestrini wrote:
> > but in the www.gnu.org site they say
> > "The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete UNIX-like
> > operating system"
> > and they choose Linux.
>
> Prof. Palestrini:  www.gnu.org is an excellent resource and I encourage
> you to read more of it.  If you read
> http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html , for example, you'll learn
> more about the chronology of GNU and the Linux kernel.  "They" didn't
> choose Linux; it's the other way around.  Another good webpage outlining
> this fascinating---and sometimes complicated---history might be
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux .
>
> I'm going to get back to work.  Have a good night!
>
> Steve


--
Prof. Antonio Palestrini
DSGSS - University of Teramo, Italy
e-mail: address@hidden