Re: Matlab compatibility for university Numerical Analysis course

[Carlo de Falco]

On 13/nov/08, at 21:37, Dotan Cohen wrote:

> I am taking a numerical analysis course at my university. We have been
> recommended to use Matlab. Is Octave considered a viable alternative
> for a university course? I understand that Octave is _mostly_ Matlab
> compatible but I am not familiar enough with either Matlab or Octave
> to make an informed decision.

I have been teaching courses in numerical analysis where lab  
excercises were done with Matlab.
For those students tht wanted to repeat the excercises at home I have  
often recomended Octave.
The only differences the students have ever found were with the  
plotting functions but those differences have been significantly  
reduced in more recent versions of Octave.
BTW I am aware of at least one textbook [1] in elementary numerical  
analysis containig examples and excercise that are explicitely  
intended to work with both matlab and Octave.

c.

[1] Scientific Computing with MATLAB and Octave
Quarteroni, Alfio, Saleri, Fausto
Springer Verlag, Series: Texts in Computational Science and  
Engineering , Vol. 2