Re: foil on benefits of octave over matlab

[Søren Hauberg]

lør, 02 08 2008 kl. 19:56 +0530, skrev bharat pathak:
> Please help me prepare one foil which brings out strengths of Octave.
> (Or even strenghts of octave as compared to commercial counterpart).

For me the main reason for using Octave over Matlab is the license. The
GPL is a wonderful piece of work that encourages people to share their
knowledge.

But Octave also has some practical advantages:
  *) One of the most helpful and friendly communities I've ever
experienced.
  *) Some syntactic sugar that Matlab doesn't have, such as support for
keywords like 'endfor'.
  *) You can use # for comments, which allows you to write Octave shell
scripts.
  *) An excellent C++ interface (the Matlab MEX interface is just about
the most awful thing I've ever seen).
  *) A rich set of packages at http://octave.sf.net 
  *) and so much more...
 
> Secondly I want to know how many functions in all does octave 3.0.1
> release has? 

Hmm, I don't know this number. The following code

  c = completion_matches (""); rows (c)

gives 1865 on my system, but this also includes the 'image' and
'statistics' package, plus 'completion_matches' also includes some
directories. But perhaps you can fiddle around with that code, and see
if you can get a function count.

Søren